Apple introduces macOS Mojave
apple.com
apple.com
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/30/apple-focus-on-software...
I too would appreciate stability and fixes. I know they are listed in the notes for each release. Still if that really was the focus that needs to be communicated
note I didn't watch the announcements so if they did emphasize that great!
Lately it seems like Apple has downshifted in competence all-around (at least on the Mac). I'll believe evidence to the contrary when I see it — not sooner.
I know that makes me seem like an HN Apple hater. And it pains me to say that. I've been a Mac fan since the mid-90s. I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt for a few years, but at this point they've blown through that into deep red territory. It makes me sad :(
I'm still on Sierra at the moment as I delay upgrading after all the horrible bugs of the new release have been found - in everyone's opinion, is now a good time to leapfrog High Sierra? Time will tell.
Give me my damn physical escape key back! the touchbar is the silliest thing ever.
I find it very hard to be excited about a yet another "major" release that doesn't even qualify as a minor version bump.
Note: macOS is not using Linux underneath. It uses the XNU kernel, which is based on Mach and BSD.
It's a Mach microkernel and a BSD userland taken from FreeBSD, which coincided with them hiring the founder of FreeBSD into a role to do release management. He's left since.
The fact you don't know this suggests you might not be aware of macOS fundamentals, the history of OS X, or MacOS that preceded it, the design decisions that went into all of those, the user groups they targeted at key points (including the adoption of FreeBSD userland), or their overall design intent.
I therefore struggle to agree with your premise that it's "not designed for pros", or that you are qualified to make that assertion.
When MacOS moved to a BSD-based system, it won over a large portion of software development. Go to almost any IT conference, you'll see people with MacBooks running MacOS (some run *nixes on MacBooks because of hardware).
In the past 4 to 5 years though Apple has let MacOS more or less stagnate.
PS: i am pretty sure caching, pre-compiling, etc are perfectly reasonable optimization techniques that many of us rely on.
One is, creating a common platform for apps to share data, live data, with one another. By live data, I mean editing a spreadsheet in Excel, and seeing it change a chart in Photoshop, instantaneously. Not after saving the file. Not after hitting a refresh button somewhere.
I know, this has been possible for decades, but there are no apps taking advantage of it, mainly because these things need a common platform with well-defined standards.
This is something that OSes are best positioned to implement, but none do.
The problem is, it's difficult to be excited in advance about a stability which is being promised, but can only be verified some months away.
But I don't care really. Give me an OS which works and doesn't get in my way. Something without ridiculous amounts of telemetry, please.
Considering Animoji and Memoji are only in Apple's Messaging app/iMessage, I think Bitmoji will be fine as long as Snapchat is fine (which, well, isn't certain).
It's in the spec, maybe developers should make their websites a bit more resilient to the very real errors that can happen? Did they just forget about error handling?
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But in any case, your application should be interacting with localStorage through an in-memory facade, otherwise it's still going to break with lots of other edge-cases. All operations should be treated as volatile, and probably silently suppressed on failures.
Using a facade also makes testing easier, and if you avoid global side-effects it becomes easier to parallelize test-cases.
Can't remember which version it was now, but I remember when Apple heavily marketed a Mac OS X version dedicated almost exclusively to bug fixes and performance enhancements.
It was very well received. I'm sure the same would happen if they announced they were dedicating an iOS version to bug fixes and performance enhancements.
EDIT: I think the version may have been Snow Leopard. :)
They could get into this during the developer SOTU, so there's hope...
EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.
They augment; they do not replace.
---
I'd also guess that just because they feature it heavily on the keynote that a huge team spent the whole year only working on just Emojis. That doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of other teams doing important ground work and internal improvements that are not that easy to showcase on a keynote for a very diverse audience and press.
We both rely on this one emoji to communicate more effectively: <smiling face with squinting eyes> [0]
We use others, but that one emoji makes all the difference in the world. Often we send only that single sign to each other.
[0] https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/
EDIT: Replace emoji with text description and add citation.
And as a follow-on, do you think the animated and personalized versions of these emojis make it that much more effective?
For me, the text version communicates the same meaning and context, so it’s fascinating to see examples where the representational medium has a significant impact.
Text, and ASCII emoticons, just don't do that.
(and I'm guessing that after I see enough "we can save you money on your car insurance :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: manipulative overuse by marketing "humans", emojis won't do it anymore either).
(Although, do you genuinely think a photo of a cat being cute is emotionally the same and just as effective as a description of a cat being cute?)
I never understood people that spent money on digital goods until I found kakaotalk emojis.
for me there is no comparison. I adore their animated emojis and I'm willing to pay for them as do many others.
you can check them out.
After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don't have to explain why you approve or add your own commentary, you just indicate your approval. And if you write a comment on a thread, there's a certain expectation that it contain an original thought or that it demands a response. So reactions manage to avoid a lot of inane filler.
For a good illustration, watch a thread on Facebook where they say "type AMEN if you agree!" and you get a thousand people tediously writing it out. If there were just a little prayer emoji and a counter, you get closer to their actual intent, since that's literally what "amen" means.
That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.
Part of what is off-putting about emoji is that they make text look like early first-language reading materials, where pictures of objects are embedded next to the word you are meant to learn. It's kind of off-putting to read, at least for those of us who grew up in that experience.
I also do not share your adoration for things that are super instantly accessible. There is much value in learning, and in struggling along the path to learning, that people think they don't want or need. Linguistic training (like learning to read written words) is a necessary skill for assimilating oneself to a new culture or in-group and language is one of the best methods for practicing that.
Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
At its core, language is a tool. Its job is to allow people to communicate ideas with other people. You're arguing that there's value in not making a tool easier to use because it promotes learning, but I disagree with that point. Sure, there's value in overcoming challenges to benefit learning, but we shouldn't create artificial challenges (like not using emojis) just for that benefit to learning by doing things in a harder way. It's like saying we should use hammers to put in screws because using a screwdriver makes things too easy. I agree that there's much value in learning, but I think learning can be done in a much more efficient and productive way than by refraining from using emojis.
Also, you have to think of the costs associated with the inefficiencies of human language. One example: look at all the scientific work being done in English. Anyone that doesn't speak English fluently is automatically at a massive disadvantage in the scientific field. These non-English speaking scientists have to spend years simply learning English to contribute their work. That's an opportunity cost. All those years could have been spent on their actual scientific work, and those individuals and society as a whole have to live with that loss. I'm obviously not arguing that emojis fix this problem, but I'm saying that simplifying our language tool in some way could.
> Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
That's an interesting point. There are differences in how emojis are interpreted, but this is no different from written or spoken language. Since the beginning of human communication, people have developed slang words and altered the rules of language. Some of these changes have spread and persisted while others died out or remained in use within specific groups of people. While the peach and eggplant emoji may not have the same interpretations across age groups, different cultures can likely still infer their meaning. For example, the see/hear/say-no-evil monkey emojis likely transcend many cultural and language barriers. Knife + scream + shower head emojis likely convey the shower scene from Psycho to anyone who's seen the movie regardless of culture or language.
Emojis do as well. As someone who has autism, I don't recognize or understand facial expressions all the time. I remember being 18 years old and finally understand what faceroll/roll eyes meant (thanks to -what it was called then- an emoticon).
AIM/ICQ already had picture-smiley support, converting :) to a smiley. The first smileys on the internet were used in the start of 80's (they're apparently used in written form as well see [1]). It was used on IRC and e-mail.
Another fun fact of that time (80s) is that domain names and TLDs used to be written in CAPITAL LETTERS. And the first spam was from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).
Acronyms are very old (widely used), and useful, but that doesn't mean they're better because they're older or more used in the past. Remember that reading in past centuries wasn't for everyone, same for latin. Acronyms are language specific which emoticons/emoji are not. The acronym LOL, one of the first chat-specific acronyms, stems from IRC and is believed to be coming from Dutch (The Dutch word lol means "fun" or [non-sexual] "pleasure". The Dutch were one of the very first if not the first countries to connect to the USA internet, and same for its IRC presence.) If you're a native English speaker you may not give a rat about acronyms being English-centric, but for the rest of the world they often don't even know what the acronyms stand for or they have their local acronyms which you or me wouldn't grasp.
Emoticons and emojis do not suffer from that problem. Case in point, the red 100 emoji is widely popular in the USA (so I heard). People don't use it here in NL. But we understand what an American would mean with it.
I believe picture language (as I call it) plus on-the-fly translation devices (what Google Glass could've been ages ago but didn't work out due to public outcry) is going to solve communication in the 21st century. The effect of the tower of Babel shall be mitigated. Why are my glasses still dumb? All these brands being sold here, are ultimately owned by the same big fat multinational. There's a huge opportunity here.
"meh"
1) The emoji has several possible interpretations/meanings depending on context, such as "I don't know", "I don't care", "indifference" or "shrug". There's this saying, "a picture says a thousand words". It applies here (nobody said the words couldn't be a few words in hundreds of different languages ;)).
2) The emoji generally does not require translation to different languages. It isn't universal, but its more accessible, and some emojis are certainly universal (such as :) which is a facial expression my 3 month old understands).
Really good point. I don't find watching a keynote speeches about emoji at all exciting, either. But I work on a mixed-language engineering team with a lot of (extremely smart, highly literate) people, and we use emoji all the time.
Whether it's cold-sweat-face or thinking-face really helps me understand the nuance of my colleague's Japanese comments (which, btw, as a native English speaker with only fair Japanese ability, gives me a free opportunity to experience 'basic or lower literacy').
I know that adding emoji characters helps them in the same way, so I use them frequently.
How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?
This may or may not be an example of it -- for all I know it's a commonly used one with a well-established metaphoric meaning --, but I think emoji usage is strangely idiosyncratic.
That isn't an isolated instance of emoji confusion for me, either. Apart from the basic facial expression emoji, for me they're a great way of making a sentence more confusing.
It’s probably not a universal meaning but my point is that emojis can be used to express more than just basic emoticon ‘UNIVERSAL EXPRESSION OF HUMAN HAPPINESS’ style things.
In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that.
Here are a couple of example questions from that test.
Only 33% of Americans could describe what is expressed in the following poem:
"The pedigree of honey Does not concern the Bee - A clover, any time, to him Is Aristocracy"
Either a literal or thematic description of the poem constitutes an acceptable answer.
Read the text at the link below. After reading this text, only 16% of Americans could describe the purpose of the Se Habla Español expo.
https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164
Acceptable answers include any statement such as the following: "to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community", "to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community" and "to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community".
Did you get the right answer? 84% of Americans didn't. Bear that in mind when you're writing documentation or dialog boxes.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-...
That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, and who is in the figures (a lot of non-English speaking immigrants), usually to try to prove points.
The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at. Over half of China is below basic by the US standard. Over half of Eastern Europe is below the US basic line, including Russia.
In the US ~44% of the below basic population are non-native English speakers, who didn't speak English at all prior to starting school. 39% are Hispanic adults. Ie this group overwhelmingly consists of currently or originally low skill, poor immigrants (people that wouldn't even be allowed into most other developed nations such as Canada).
Demonstrating that effect in action, 43% of hispanic adults test poorly in literacy, compared to about 10% of white adults. Gee, I wonder if immigration into a new culture + language barrier has something to do with these numbers.
Despite a vast immigration flow of low skill, poor, low English literate persons since 1980, the US literacy rate didn't drop meaningfully. That means literacy rates for the base population increased.
Despite all of that, the US is the 7th most literate nation on earth, in front of: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel, South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Russia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/...
Americans are well educated relative to the global population. That isn't what we're discussing. OP is explaining why large swaths of the population might prefer communicating with pictures over words. It isn't that they can't understand words. Just that parsing and constructing language to express complex thoughts isn't a common experience for many, for whatever reason. Emojis fill that gap.
In a globalised world, a great many people are frequently communicating in a language that they have not fully mastered. South Africa has eleven official languages. India has 22. Globally, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers by two-to-one. Hindi/Urdu has a roughly equal number of first and second language users.
But as for deciding it exists because people aren't smart enough to use words, U+1F914.
(I know this thread isn't about the methodology of literacy assessment, but now I'm really curious to know how they do it. Does publicly available question-level response data exist somewhere out there? from previous years?)
What if printed words were really just a transitional state of language until their purest form, emoji!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplicatio...
Wow that is an extremely generous characterization. At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
The emojis serve a purpose. Text doesn't serve that purpose. I don't know how to describe the niche they fill with text. They're not a stand-in for emoticons.
You don't get it. It's okay. Not everything is for you.
Consider the possibility that this is because there isn't one.
The meaning is immediately clear to anyone familiar with the reference. It's basically a pictographic language that leans heavily on a shared culture that's largely internet-based.
You sure do have some text there.
>> "Why was that so difficult to use words to describe?"
The medium is the message.
So you can't explain it, but it's I who "doesn't get it". Ok then. I'll excuse you for a bit as it's going to take some time to untwist your brain from that logical contortion.
Can you seriously not distinguish between the tiny selection and low res quality of text faces, and the wide variety of highly specific and detailed set of reactions now available to us? There's only so much you can do with text before you have to be extremely creative (a level of effort excessive for quick casual conversations) or rely on the other party being familiar with your specific vocabulary of text-faces.
Then give us a single example! So many replies _and not a single example of where words or ascii fail to impart what only an emoji can_. You can say "they're obviously better" until you're blue in the face, but it's all hot air until you prove it.
Obviously words can (almost certainly) impart what an emoji can - but one small image versus maybe 100 words? That's before you start combining them and the expanded meaning you can get from that.
You might as well say "give me an example of where Proper English fails to import what only slang can" - you're missing the point.
I have the choice of either adjusting my writing style to new people, which I’d rather not, or use either text or picture emoji to convey the tone that makes my writing clearer to people who can’t infer it. I find that image-based emoji are much more specific in the mood they convey, and provide more range — and there is a definite difference in how clearly I come across.
Well, no one actually does, so I'm glad we got out ahead of that problem.
> They're also much higher-resolution so it's easier to pull meaning from an unfamiliar one.
except you don't really need that many. There are a few common emotions that people use... and then there are winky T-Rex emoji's that are completely unnecessary.
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I don't think that solves the problem at all. In fact, I don't think that solves any problems at all.
If anything, it causes way more problems than it solves.
More challenging: what’s the text version of a singing, eye-rolling T-Rex?
It’s fine to not care about emoji, but you can’t logically dismiss them as prettier smilies.
"Happy birthday!"
> More challenging: what’s the text version of a singing, eye-rolling T-Rex?
Ok, you got me there, because I have no idea what concept is even meant to be communicated by such an absurd thing.
Depends on context. If we were discussing someone, it might signal criticism or a desire to party. The fact that it cannot compress losslessly into words is the whole point.
No, we can't. There is an inherent visual component to emojis. A picture worth a thousand words, et cetera.
It's not an abstract idea mapping to an arbitrary icon; without prior explanation, many emojis make sense (within a certain cultural context). Kind of like how we can't replace the essence of giving a friend a gift or a lover a flower with words or an arbitrary icon. Apple understands this in a way few technology companies do.
What a coincidence, the exact same thing is true about written words.
>Kind of like how we can't replace the essence of giving a friend a gift or a lover a flower with words or an arbitrary icon. Apple understands this in a way few technology companies do.
I feel like you're one of those people who would have been way into flaming guitar gifs and midi on your geocities page in the 90s. I mean, seriously? You're literally saying that sending a gif conveys so much more meaning meaning it is similar to giving a gift or a flower than sending a text.
Maybe you're right: https://tinyurl.com/y7xeu7dc
Very likely less than the amount of different native language speakers who understand the vast majority of your emoticons/emojis.
I suppose you don't care cause you just speak your native language with other people who are native speakers. But a universal language on top of that has huge benefits in international circles. And, my 3 month old understands the :) smile. One of the very first abilities a newborn learns is recognizing faces. That's when they cannot even see a meter far!
I find that difficult to believe. On the other hand, given enough time and global interaction in that medium, it could develop a stable enough meaning across a large enough conceptual space to have a situation no worse than exists between any "standard" language and its various dialects. That'd be interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well, not always universal. Some are generally well understood. They're easy to learn (you might wanna also look into where to start if you're interested in learning many languages; I understood its best to start with an Asian language such as Japanese/Korean/Chinese), and on top of that even allow to learn languages easily (see Memrise and Duolingo who use SVG art to teach languages. They use the same SVG art in different languages!). Even on school when children learn their first words (which are in Dutch: boom/roos/vis/vuur, English meaning: tree/rose/fish/fire) this is done via pictures!
Emoticons and emoji are contextual, yes.
If I say:
That's fun ;) :)
That has a different meaning than:
That is fun :)
or
That is fun ;)
Different context, yet a wink or smile is universal.
And if I'd write:
Dat is leuk :)
You wouldn't understand it because you don't speak Dutch. But you would understand the smiley. Without using any translator. The emoticon & emoji always describes the text around it, like an adjective (though it could also describe other smileys). As such, it is descriptive.
True, sometimes the emoticons (and especially emoji) explanation must be explained. Once it is explained, it can be used in combination with any language. For example, the kappa emoji [1] which originates from Twitch can be used on an English stream, but also on a Spanish or Japanese one. Its generally understood within the gamer community, but if you'd start using it within your local hockey club they'd first need to understand the meaning.
> That's fun ;) :)
> That has a different meaning than:
> That is fun :)
> or
> That is fun ;) > > Different context, yet a wink or smile is universal.
Really? Because I can't see any real difference between any of those examples. Does the wink mean you're being sarcastic? Or that you're coming on to me? What purpose does the smiley serve? you already said it was fun, one could presume that would leave you in a positive emotional state.
> the kappa emoji [1] which originates from Twitch can be used on an English stream
I hate those stupid things so much, probably because I have no context for understanding their meaning and, since its already an english stream, you could just use words! And if you're not speaking the same language as the rest of the stream, you can't express anything meaningful enough to be worth saying anyway.
That'd depend on the rest of the text. It could mean I am making a joke ("not serious" / "just kidding"). It could mean I'm sarcastic. It could mean that I'm trying to hit on you. I think that sums it up (though I'm open for different explanations).
Thing is, back in the days, even in native languages between native speakers (but more so with one or more non-native) sarcasm and jokes weren't always easy to detect. The wink smiley specifically filled that niche! If you don't know about the story behind it, you might find it interesting to look it up.
As for the difference between these, "That is fun :)" denotes no sarcasm, but warmth. Possibly still humor, but its a genuine statement. "That is fun ;)" was covered earlier above and "That is fun ;) :)" is a mixed bag which could go either way (possibly clever to "talk your way out of the meaning" e.g. when trying to flirt but its not well received, or to create some -albeit simple- mysticism around your flirt). That's without knowing the context. The context still matters and is, ultimately, decisive for the meaning.
I have autism, btw, so although I find this fascinating it is rather difficult for me to understand. It took me serious effort to learn the meaning of the different emoticons/emoji (as far as one can know them, since there's so many in unicode these days).
> I hate those stupid things so much, probably because I have no context for understanding their meaning and, since its already an english stream, you could just use words! And if you're not speaking the same language as the rest of the stream, you can't express anything meaningful enough to be worth saying anyway.
(I don't like it either but that's because it is overused in these circles, and it reminds me of my age ie. that I'm not youth anymore.)
The ability to understand a language isn't binary. (See e.g. the example of the wink where language is not being understood!)
Another example coming from my own is I understand some Spanish, some French, some and some German, but I do not want to learn any French or Portuguese, and my German is better than my Spanish but I'm very curious to learn more Spanish. My English is pretty good, as is my Dutch, but I'm only interested in learning more English and Spanish; Dutch not so much. YMMV obviously.
I'd like to see examples of both of these. Specifically how the T-Rex plays a role because, if you take the T-Rex out, we're back to something I can easily convey in ascii.
May I ask if you read fiction in more than one language? There are constructions even in those close to English which I find impossible to accurately translate in a way that preserves the delight of the interaction between their phrasing and underlying meaning.
For T-Rex, two examples:
"I drank too much at the Christmas party.
Not as much as Bob. He puked in the restaurant sink before appetizers were served.
[Dancing eye-rolling T-Rex]"
--or--
"Let's go.
Where?
BarBar.
BarBar?
Happy hour pricing until midnight.
[Dancing eyes-rolled-back T-Rex]"
In the former, the emoji communicates derision. In the latter, playfulness. Depending on the style of animation and context, the emoji could further communicate cuteness versus tactile incompetence, letting go versus a loss of control, subject versus object.
The process of decoding an emoji is analogous to a simplified form of interpreting art. Why is that there? Am I supposed to interpret it using the positive or negative connotation? In some cases, less ambiguity is desired. But in others, the ambiguity itself carries information of a sort impossible to parse into words.
>Not as much as Bob. He puked in the restaurant sink before appetizers were served.
>[Dancing eye-rolling T-Rex]"
Ummmm... Points for trying I guess? You lost me at "person who drank too much == T-Rex"
Communication is rife with ambiguities, emotion, shortcuts, and mistakes. And between people who share friendship or more personal relationships, those “flaws” are often features, not bugs.
The concept of emoji, I feel, embraces those flaws.
(And personally speaking on the subject of emoji vs common text shorthand, if I never see “lol” again it’ll be too soon.)
> (And personally speaking on the subject of emoji vs common text shorthand, if I never see “lol” again it’ll be too soon.)
Funny, I feel the same way about emoji. I dunno, maybe I'm too autistic to get it, but when people use emoji it makes me feel like I'm talking to a child who hasn't learned express themselves like an adult yet.
Really?
Pet rocks were wildly popular. Unhealthy foods are wildly popular. Cocaine is wildly popular (well maybe that's a stretch).
I think there's a correlation problem here. However, I think you're missing the point again; _what can I convey via an emoji that I cannot convey in ascii_? I have yet to see a single example, and that's what started the entire debate.
And neither of you tried to address the core argument I made in the parent, that emoji reflect the inherent messiness of personal communications and for that matter personal relationships.
The same reason it’s important (but inefficient) to tell someone you love them in nonverbal ways is the reason emoji are popular. We all appreciate communications that extend beyond the written word. Emoji is just another option among many for achieving that.
And exactly zero people, including yourself, have been able to provide a single gle example where text fails to convey what an icon can. And, you, that was the entire subject of this discussion if you haven't noticed.
Yeah, figured that would be trotted out at some point. That's a fine sounding argument, but do you really feel emoji's are on the same level as the advent of video? I don't believe you do. At some point you have to take a look at the specific thing you're talking about and get down out of the clouds.
I have yet to hear a reasonable argument as to why emoji's are better. All I see here is "they're different and can be funny." Ok.
There has never been a way to put images in a sentence as easy and expressive as emoji (all there used to be was fonts like Wingdings), and it’s standardized. That is quite revolutionary.
"This helps me communicate" is not a falsifiable claim. You're telling lots of people that they have somehow made a mistake in interpreting their own life experiences. You are not even considering the possibility that something is there, and you just can't see it.
Is that a serious question?
> More challenging: what’s the text version of a singing, eye-rolling T-Rex?
Who cares because that's dumb? Can you tell me what deep emotional state is being conveyed by a T-rex rolling its eyes? I think you lost track of the premise we're debating.
> At best they're just prettier versions of :) and :( and I don't see how they allow people to convey ideas they couldn't do just as well via text.
Never did I say "These are dumb get off my lawn!" I said they don't meaningfully impact or improve communication, which is in direct response to the person I replied to who said that they have "opened a whole new way to communicate."
That's a serious claim, I'd like to see a single coherent argument to show it's actually the case. But, no, all I get are mischaracterizations of what I said.
The debate is not "are pretty things nice", it's "have emoji's fundamentally improved communication".
If the debate is not about how something looks then why was your first instinct to dismiss them as “just prettier versions of :) and :(“?
...because I was responding to someone who said emojis were a new and previously unrealized form of communication! Seriously guys...
You know, you're right; I find myself reaching for a "smashes head against brick wall" emoji right about now.
Oh, damn; I just described that emotion with words. I guess I'm still right.
The debate is not "are emojis widely used". Yes, of course they are. The question is "opened a whole new way to communicate with each other", which is what I responded to.
I say, no, they haven't. I can convey the same emotions with ascii. I can convey the same emotions with written text. If you want to prove me wrong then fine, but don't re-frame the discussion.
Do you really think this?
I don't really 'get' emojis but I think you're woefully underestimating their impact on communication and language. The emoji library on a normal iPhone is enormous.
...yes?
>you're woefully underestimating their impact on communication and language. The emoji library on a normal iPhone is enormous
What does one have to do with the other? Yes, there are a lot of dumb icons to chose from. How does that directly lead to "[having a] large impact on communication and language"? If that's true, do you think it's a _positive_ impact?
Can you help me better understand what ASL language support would look like or what that would mean to you?
If you consider how ingrained and emotionally significant that expressions in your native language are, animojis with hands - which will take that emotional significance and put a cute spin on it - is going to be massive.
I do not know how to sign, but I do imagine that a member of the signing community would not feel truly at home in their digital life in that they cannot type the language that they "speak" and very probably think in, but must rather resort to a second auxiliary language whenever they interact with text.
Like, imagine if Apple (or Google or anyone else--this is an industry-wide issue) made it technically impossible for you communicate in anything except French. In this hypothetical world it is not a show stopping issue because you are fully proficient in French having used it in some way nearly every day of your life, and so are all the people you would want to communicate with. But it's not your mother tongue, and so you wouldn't really feel at home or fully included in the digital world, now would you? Texting your family and close friends in French when in fact all your other interactions with them are using spoken English would just be weird.
(Incidentally I do wonder if Swiss German or Scotts speakers feel similarly, and if they don't to what extent that serves as a counter point.)
I don't know about Swiss German speakers, but Scots speakers tend to be fairly comfortable in code-switching between standard written English and a transliterated form of Scots.
Scottish Twitter is as culturally distinctive as African American Twitter:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/get-right-inty-the-mic...
Wikipedia has a Scots language version:
I could imagine signing emoji being pretty successful. My son is deaf, but too young to be using chat software, so it's difficult to say without asking about at his school.
1. people communicate in many different ways and
2. these things aren't valueless just because I don't picture myself using them. And in retrospect, I only struggle to picture myself authoring one; receiving them is completely fine.
Deleted comment
But I'm not sure I totally understand what Animoji does for you. Your deafness is irrelevant in the context of messaging apps, isn't it? Hearing people, when using Messages, have just writing/reading, just like you.
Is it that, being deaf, you are more used to puting extra emphasis on non-verbal communication, and thus the transition to Messages from "real life" conversation feels more limiting than for us? How is it any better than sending a short video, or may be recording a gif of your actual face? Doesn't the loss in fidelity make it frustratingly hard to express the nuances we get from facial expression?
I tend to think all of those grandiouse statements about "Opening new ways of communicating" or "Creating new connexions between people" are total bullshit. Most animoji users communicate equally well with or without them, it add's nothing except fun. And that's fine! Fun is good.
But it's really hard to put oneself on anyone else's shoes, and I'd love to know if anyone has found more value in animojis.
Only slightly related, but this latest migration back to a "sign-like" language (the emojis) reminds me of Giambattista Vico's "Scienza Nuova" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science), where at some point he says that the language spoken by the first humans ("the giants") was a "mute" one, based on "signs", which was correlated with a poetic sense of mind, so to speak.
> Beginning with the first form of authority intuited by the giganti or early humans and transposed in their first "mute" or "sign" language, Vico concludes that “first, or vulgar, wisdom was poetic in nature.” This observation is not an aesthetic one, but rather points to the capacity inherent in all men to imagine meaning via comparison and to reach a communal "conscience" or "prejudice" about their surroundings.
There's of course nothing scientific about Vico's discourse, but his themes somehow stick and resonate more (at least to people like me) compared to the latest linguistic findings.
Emojis I agree, they are standardized and their meaning is clear by convention. Animojis? That's just salespeak for snapchat-like filters. They're funny but the novelty wears off the same day.
Allowing people to call each other as avatars complete with facial expressions or with flattering filters applied gets rid of one of the last remaining key barriers to mass video calling adoption: people tend to look like hell in low light on front-facing cameras. Teenagers will upgrade to Face ID just to get these features, grandkids will love calling their grandparents as cartoon tigers and grandparents will love responding as cartoon dinosaurs.
Also nice to see the fruits of the Workflow acquisition, this will allow people to do all sorts of customisations including using slang and profanity to trigger commands. "Hey Siri, order my favourite fucking pizza".
At least it’s merely wasteful and not actually toxic. They could be working on more adtech.
That's a rather silly comparison. I guess the same logic doesn't apply to Electronic Arts/Oracle/Comcast/<insert hated company on HN>. People seem to be giving them money, and yet people also simultaneously hate them. I think we can and should criticize things we don't like, but only if we're honest with our reasons.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17302720/wechat-deleted-m...
The Chinese authorities in the article didn't "monitor" anything. They retrieved the deleted message from the phone itself. For all we know, it could be as innocuous as running a SQLite DELETE to delete the message and the scheduled vacuum hasn't run yet. I don't see any convincing evidence of either actual monitoring or Tencent conspiring to allow such monitoring.
not only is it disappointing and boring but things are starting to go backwards.
Last time I saw a courageous desktop OS change, it was Windows merging their Mobile and desktop OS, and that was a hard fail.
It's a workstation. I prefer reliability and consistency. I think Apple knows they need to keep the general public buying macbooks with stupid superficial features, while maintaining consistent, reliable, functionality for the power users out there before they get annoyed and migrate to Linux machines. Hopefully they address the hardware reliability issues (ie. keyboards) in their next hardware release.
Modern OpenGL? App store with useful apps?
But that's nothing that affects me personally. What bugs me about macOS is how sloppy, buggy and limited it has become. Finder sucks big time. SMB doesn't work all too reliably. Wanna domain join - tough luck. (Even Linux distros are advanced in that area - Gnome 3 on Fedora allowed me to setup Enterprise Login and just entering ID / Password for my AD account during initial setup and it all worked flawlessly!). The OS updates are atrociously slow - at least they are infrequent but just goes to show how much attention they're really paying.
That's just from memory - I haven't used it for last year.
When a site requests location permission I only get the option to deny request and make Safari remember that decision for a "day", not "forever" which is what I would like Safari to do, esp. for sites like Google.
Now I have looked at forums and didn't find anything that helped. Contacted Apple support (via call and chat both) and on both the occasions I was told that I need to reinstall the OS which was frustrating but heck I did just that with last major update - backed up my data and did a fresh install. I still face that issue. I called Apple Support I was again asked to do the same - reinstall macOS as Safari alone cannot be reinstalled.
This is in addition to last year's announcement that "macOS High Sierra is the last version of macOS to run 32bit apps without compromise"
I wonder if we will soon see a new lineage of Macbooks fitted with Apple-specific arm64 chips.
The most scary thought is if UIKit-on-macOS starts requiring Developer ID entitlements and need to be installed via the app store, with fairplay DRM encryption of binaries and everything.
Edit: Also, r.i.p. my old macbook air 2011 :-/
Edit: and XQuartz (X11) with OpenGL comes in handy once in a while too...
Also, it seems to me that the better option in the long run for legacy game support is to just run a VM for the highest degree of compatibility.
EDIT: As a follower of https://mesamatrix.net/ I don't think it would be unreasonable to say about 3 years to get something that kind of works, five for something semi reasonable, and 8 for something at modern open gl level.
Doesn't seem cost-effective at scale to run on beefy Apple machines.
This is sort of like saying "people only do web serving workloads on Linux, we don't need web servers to run on Apple machines" to me.
Almost all of my (and my lab's) time is spent tinkering with small numerical examples before sending it off to one of the lab machines to run overnight, and using the GPU on the MBP through OpenCL is a huge advantage.
Sadly, most companies won't have any choice but to port their app to Apple's proprietary APIs. It's really a net loss for consumers because most of these devs have better things to spend their time on than Apple breaking compatibility on a whim.
Pixelmator, at least, is based on Core Image, which Apple has probably already moved from OpenCL to Metal.
I know this isn't what you're really complaining about, though.
You mean Objective-C++.
For example, Metal compute shaders are C++14 and Khronos only adopted C++ in OpenCL after the beating they took from CUDA, which supported it since the beginning.
And maybe the same informal/external support model for OpenCL?
Performance will be diminished but not extinguished.
The only successful variants of it, actually do constrain devs with either Web or Java corporate frameworks, with a very tiny subset of native code allowed to take part into the whole game.
Well, some people refuse to use non-platform-native lowest-common-denominator libs, so there's that too...
Apple/Google/Microsoft/Mozilla and others are all participating
A reasonable alternative would be to implement OpenGL on top of Metal for compatibility but this is a lot of work.
edit, ups just read it: Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders. [0]
The low-level graphics APIs like Metal and Vulkan allow for much better performance, but they are much harder to use and require more work from the developer (hence, they’re usually used only by game engine makers). Higher-level graphics APIs like OpenGL are less efficient and have lower peak performance, but are easier to use for individual projects and have the benefit of having existing functional code (no need to rewrite a working project).
Also, OpenGL (and its mobile and web variants OpenGL ES and WebGL) are very portable (macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, both and native and in browsers), while Metal is macOS/iOS-only.
Maybe I'm biased - every time I looked at OpenGl code I shuddered and ran away to a higher level framework (I'm excluding shader code from this - that's concise enough for me not to mind getting that close to the metal)
That's why I wasn't sure what Metal is offering instead.
Vulkan, you need to know exactly what you are doing. There are little to no handhelding. You are trying to squeeze out every last 10% of performance in exchange for lots more development time. You need to write a hell a lot more code to do something what you previously thought were simple.
OpenGL is higher level that should be compared to Direct3D 10, not 11. As a matter of fact I will go about saying compare to Direct 3D 9. And unless you are a OpenGL zealot, any sane game developers would have told you Direct X 9 already exceed OpenGL in most way.
Metal is offering what most of Vulkan can do and making it even easier then OpenGL.
Honestly I don't get / understand why all the backlash. OpenGL is deprecated, and it simply means Apple won't be updating OpenGL anymore. Stop asking every god damn year. They have been shipping other deprecated library and API for years! OpenGL is developed in such a way that no one really cares. And designed by committees for maximum backward compatibility. And if you want your App on iOS, you will have to use Metal anyway.
A 3D modern API that acknowledges the time of pure C APIs is long gone, with C++14 as shading/compute language, providing math, 3D models, materials, fonts, textures support.
Whereas in OpenGL you are stuck with fishing for libraries, multiple execution paths depending on the extensions and bugs, compiling and linking shaders at runtime without library support, C style APIs and a plethora of deprecated APIs.
I also wonder what means for WebGL and its future. Right now, WebGL works in browsers on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android, which is incredible. There is no equivalent.
Sure, Apple has started working on WebGPU, but that’s not yet ready nor is it guaranteed to gain Linux, Windows, Android support.
It's important to note that NXT isn't necessarily a replacement for ANGLE. It's an experimental replacement for WebGL as a whole, with a different API. There still needs to be a way to run WebGL programs on Mac if this deprecation leads to removal a few versions down the line.
https://twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1002324195135520768
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dota-2-I...
So that's pretty promising!
The key being that if you've got a technology that works on both server farms for production and workstations for development, you support that so that your OS is a viable candidate for the developer workstation. I don't see a Metal port coming to Linux in any reasonable way any time soon, and I don't see researchers giving up OpenCL or even OpenGL any time soon, so it just means that Apple is going to forego that business.
With the recent github purchase it gives the oddly dissonant experience of having Microsoft being the 'developer friendly' OS company and the MacOS being the 'developer hostile' OS company. Where, and this is important, support for cross platform tools determines hostility or support. I would not argue that Apple is not the best development environment for the Apple platform, or Windows for the Windows platform.
So I can't imagine this is going to hurt at all.
Everything is CUDA. Everything depends on the shitty unstable software designed by a hardware company (Nvidia). This sucks and I hope someone can disrupt it, but Apple has no influence in the field of GPU computing.
And I work in data science and nobody is using their own laptops when you have AWS.
I work in data science too, and who cares about laptops. Desktop computers with GPUs, SSDs, and a lot of RAM are what you need. You can thoroughly bling out the hardware and the entire computer will still cost less than your monthly AWS bill to access a GPU. (This is all getting pretty irrelevant to Apple, though, who doesn't make such computers.)
Wow, does this mean Maya, Houdini, and basically every 3D package out there will no longer run on macOS? If so that seriously sucks for 3D pros.
I'm guessing you haven't used apps like Maya, Nuke, or Houdini. They were all written in the mid-90's on IRIX machines and later ported to Linux, Windows, and OSX. Surprisingly, 3d performance isn't always big goal of their's. My guess is the core features don't sell new versions, so even though they have annual releases those things don't get much attention. They'll have drawing issues and transparency sorting problems for years. Same with audio bugs.
Their Mac support was spotty and irregular until the past 5-10 years.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EvilBachus/status/100372239162797... https://mobile.twitter.com/tha_rami/status/10037287912173649... https://mobile.twitter.com/radiatoryang/status/1003732865648...
[1] at least the portion I follow on twitter
Metal and OpenGL two completely different APIs, shading languages and probably a whole host of other things.
I've ported my fair share of things from fixed-function to programmable shader pipelines and you'd be effing naive if you think you can do that in a couple weeks on anything more than a toy demo.
Getting pixels on the screen and shipping something to end users are to very, very different things, 90/10 rule and all that.
Vulkan also has the benefit of multiple platforms supporting it so you're not doing all that work for a minority(which is what OSX is in the graphics space) platform.
I develop an OpenGL-based video engine for a live media playback application, which is very nearly as simple an application of OpenGL as you can expect to find in the real world, and there's no way I could expect to port it to Metal in a week or two singlehandedly. Like others have mentioned, it's a completely different paradigm, not just a matter of changing around some function calls.
That said, I welcome this change with open arms (and secure in the knowledge that legacy code will continue to work for the foreseeable future). OpenGL is a fragmented, brittle, spaghetti-inducing pile of global state. Rewriting in Metal isn't anywhere near as small a project as Apple claims, but I'm perversely looking forward to it -- I'll be very happy to have OpenGL in my rearview mirror.
When it was introduced, the Core frameworks were updated to use Metal instead, with OpenGL left for backwards compatibility mode.
This was never true for game consoles, regardless of urban myths regarding OpenGL support.
If you aren't in Rust, just use Vulkan. There are high-performance wrappers for it in various stages of development, such as MoltenVK[2] for macOS and iOS, and VulkanOnD3D12[3] for UWP. Non-UWP Windows, Linux, and Android should support Vulkan natively through their GPU drivers.
[1]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx
I can't say I'll be protesting by not buying a new Mac because I'm already devoid of any desire to do so.
How does this effect Qt iOS applications?
It’s the smaller scale developers and projects that might not have have such ability.
Games made by developers who've gone out of business are probably just going to stop working in a few versions of MacOS.
(Not intending to nitpick--just pointing out that Riot is a LOT bigger than many folks realize)
---
The fact they want to force game developers to use instead Metal is... ridiculous, especially considering the extremely low macos marketshare, particularly outside US.
It's so frustrating to read what the GPU is actually capable of (for example in the intel PRMs) and to know that there is absolutely no way to get the driver's compiler to do the right thing in a reliable way.
I mean imagine if icc was the only x86 compiler.
How ugly would the JAI code to need to be to interface with this?
I wish they had a simple Metal C API, but their new API comes with a bunch of Objective-C baggage.
In Metal the Obj-C abstraction is part of the design and used to eliminate any other abstraction people would want to introduce. The objects you get back from the API are implemented straight in the GPU vendor code, and the debug tools can swap the methods out for extra validation, recording, etc.
If you're worried about refcounting, use ARC (which you have to with Swift anyway). First, the compiler is very smart about optimizing away retain/release/autorelease calls whenever it can. Second, when those calls do have to be made, they're implemented using vtables, and never hit objc_msgSend() in the first place.
I really hate to see such a focus on a platform lock-in API when viable alternatives(Vulkan) are available.
macOS performance was already getting so poor on 2010/2011 MacBook Airs, so I think this is the right move. I recently downgraded my old 2GB 2010 MacBook Air back to 10.11 El Capitan and it runs much, much better than it did on High Sierra.
Make up your fucking minds. Developers aren't hamsters.
I now declare MacOS to be deprecated, if that's how it's going to be.
You could put money on how long this page gets forgotten and left up.
3.5 mm = 1) there is no way a wireless medium will ever have better throughput than a wired medium over a superb DAC - ever, 2) dongle, 3) extra battery worry now for BT.
OpenGL, I will grant you that one, since both Metal and/or Vulkan are a vast improvement on OpenGL.
I know that some people like to say this, but it's pretty clearly wrong, and it makes you look unobservant when you repeat it. It takes about five seconds and two phones to demonstrate this. The standard top section on every phone, Android and iOS alike, is a dedicated status section with little system icons with wide gaps of unused blank space between them. Every phone, every time. A notched phone just puts the camera directly between those icons instead of putting unused pixels there. It doesn't take a genius to see that un-notched phones have both larger top bezels and more pixels wasted in the status area. The notch doesn't cut into the screen. The screen extends up around the camera and puts the status icons on the horns.
> and is aesthetically displeasing
All of the tens of people I know who have notched phones say they love it and don't notice the notch. So, maybe to you, but it seems like the market is speaking.
Looks like UIKit is the future, despite protestations to the contrary.
- AppKit isn't layer-backed by default, requiring you to handle this. Something as simple as setting the background color for an NSView is far more of a ritual than it is for a UIView.
- NSColor/NSImage under the hood are different than UIColor and UIImage.
- NSTableView and NSCollectionView have big differences (NSCollectionView is more subtle, I should say) that rear their head when you start trying to do anything like you would on iOS. e.g, NSTableView doesn't automatically get an NSScrollView, grouped rows operate like headers but the underlying data structure isn't easy to share, collection view items are view controllers on macOS but not on iOS, etc.
- Delegate methods are entirely different, requiring you to #if check everywhere.
- Trying to use NSTextField like a UILabel is a trip, requiring you to understand an archaic NSCell architecture that you'll wish you didn't have to deal with in 2018.
The list goes on, and most developers that share code between iOS and macOS have their own frankenstein framework floating around. UIKit on macOS would do a lot to alleviate this.
Edited because, speaking of 2018... this should not be this annoying to format.
EDIT: Looks like you got there before I finished typing.
Or you just use an NSBox as the rearmost subview of the NSView, and set its fill color.
Cocoa developers tend to think it's all very apparent though. Was actually counting down until a comment like that appeared. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's what a ritual is; it's 2018 and I should not have to go out of my way to set a damn background color on a view. UIView has predictable behavior, AppKit does not.
Props to Apple for finally fixing it.
Regardless of how correct he probably is, the fact of the matter is that there's overwhelmingly more developers on the UIKit side and that API is what people clearly prefer - the only ones voicing otherwise are old Cocoa-heads. It's ridiculous that it's 10 years later and Apple is only now confronting this.
Definitely not gonna be like what happened with Windows Metro apps
Bizarre doublespeak in the presentation though as they denied this was the plan - explicitly said no merger.
"Are you merging iOS and macOS?" "No."
Then proceeded to detail the port of the iOS APIs to Mac and some apps just using those APIs.
Time will tell, but I think a merge is exactly what they are planning long term, and it makes sense to do so (with some differences for user input and larger screens). It's crazy to develop very similar APIs for GUI apps in parallel, and what has become two different OSs with slightly different apps and feature sets, but a huge amount of overlap. The savings for Apple and developers of having a consistent set of new APIs and one set of apps to manage (for example their entire office suite) would be huge.
The sheer pressure of money and users on the iOS side means that will be the dominant one, and UIKit will win.
Re lockdown, that's more a political decision than a technical one, it could go either way, I suspect both platforms will become gradually more and more similar (they already are converging) and the future will be close to the one you fear, with at the very least some ARM powered locked down laptops (which I'd be very happy with).
Right, and what the announcement seems to show is that UIKit could eventually grow to replace AppKit. Like you yourself say - "uikit is a better appkit written with the benefit of experience".
That still doesn't imply the two OS would necessarily be merged - there's still a ton of things that make sense for macOS that are not needed in iOS, and vice versa - just for one thing, they have vastly different energy budgets. There's also a ton of overlap and shared code already, for pieces that it does make sense to share.
So, I still think the answer is really targeted at people who fear that iOS (with all of its current limitations) will replace macOS, essentially, rather than being a misdirection as you seem to find it?
From a developer perspective, I expect them to arrive at one API, with a few options to allow feedback from various sources (tap or click), and handling multiple screen sizes gracefully, and therefore pretty much one OS, so that you can build one app across devices - this is exactly what they are trying out with their ios app port. Once you do that, it doesn't make sense to have two APIs.
I can't think of many features that would be exclusive - to take your example of energy budgets, saving energy on both is equally important now that laptops are a mainstay and desktops an afterthought. We may well see ARM laptops for this reason. Watches are the one exception that have a budget so tight at present that normal apps just aren't feasible.
So I think a merge is exactly what is on the cards in the long term, particularly as they are now run by an operations person and the money flows in more and more from phones, not computers.
If that's the whole story, it would be pretty nice to be able to make apps that work on both platforms with only a few source differences.
[1] https://wiki.winehq.org/Winelib_User%27s_Guide#What_is_Winel...
WWDC is about software first and foremost. This year they decided not to dilute it with anything hardware.
That wasn't a given, but it wasn't surprising, either.
WWDC 2010: iPhone 4 announced
WWDC 2012: Retina MacBook Pro announced
WWDC 2013: new Mac Pro, Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme, and MacBook Air announced
WWDC 2017: iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro, iMac Pro, 10.5" iPad Pro and HomePod announced
and more recently, 1 of the last 5.
1. 2009
2. 2010
3. 2011
4. 2012
5. 2013
6. 2014
7. 2015
8. 2016
9. 2017
10. 2018
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-night-shift-blue-light...
I used high contrast accessibility as a de facto night mode. In iOS 11 (or maybe 11.x?) they changed it to "Smart Invert" which tries to be smarter about inverting by not inverting the colors on images. Unfortunately it has all kinds of problems. Safari will randomly crash when viewing images. Sometimes is shows the wrong image (e.g. two images in a row and it will show the same image twice instead of two different images). Sometimes half an image will be inverted. Sometimes when I go back to regular mode the images will go into inverted mode. And it makes charts or maps with an HTML legend impossible to read because legend gets inverted but the image does not.
Turbo-charged night mode. No "smart inversion" to worry about, no orange stuff that suddenly becomes screaming blue. Just a nice monochromatic red display that you can see in the dark without ruining your night vision or confusing your body's clock.
It goes along with the "Places in CA" theme Cook introduced, and, honestly, honeybadger don't give a shit.
I'm very curious why. Are there changes to Sandboxing? For all developers, or only select partners? Or changes to the revenue split?
Under "normal" circumstances I wouldn't care, but I use it a lot for development with the same site, so I don't know which is what.
Granted, what Apple News could really benefit from would be an option to log in and read from my sources through a web browser. It would be nice if I could check up on things from, for instance, a public library.
I think you're onto it, though. And the more effort publishers put into the content, I think the better they'd do. Unfortunately many decisions on the digital front have so far been decided by marketing or operations along the old anti-Ford model: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."— they aren't so keen on improving experience, they just want faster horses.
It doesn't seem like we need to invent anything new here, just make a version of RSS that can natively serve rich multimedia content and be gated behind a subscription.
Magazines and some newspapers, however, are very zealous about their design—and rightfully so. Apple has tried to find a middle ground with the Apple News format[0], but it's still a little wanting with regard to print design standards. Some art directors/teams are more accepting of new constraints than others as well.
---
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_news/apple_n...
Would be nice if I didn't have to fear this upgrade quite as much.
I imagine it won't be trivial to do this, especially on pages that have a background image. You don't want to invert it, but leaving it as-is would ruin the night mode effect. Plus, you have to maintain sufficient contrast with foreground text.
Websites will be entirely unaffected as they have they're own custom CSS palettes.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
This is a big flaw, imo. A universal color scheme like 'dark mode' should take priority over individual app's preferences. A consistent, quality design was one of the things that first attracted me to the Mac, but what with every app doing its own thing, that ideal is a thing of the past.
BTW, the Spotify app called. It's had dark mode for ages ... (/s)
Stocks, News, iTunes, Maps, Photos, Mail, etc, should be optional.
However I imagine it's probably a good way to get people to stay up to date with the latest OS: "Oh, I want that shiny new app, I must update"
Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...
Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-mode/dmghijel...
I think you missed the hidden story there (and by 'hidden' I mean, they actually mentioned it during the keynote). They announced that they're working on a toolkit to easily port over iOS apps into MacOS with very few manual changes to the code.
The effort they're putting into porting News, Stocks, etc. into MacOS is actually just them field-testing their UIKit <-> AppKit conversion platform.
I have to say, I would probably have never paid for news had it not been for how convenient Apple has made it.
Apple News has a surprisingly large (and fast growing) usage numbers/readers (1, 2). Add in news of Apple re-booting ads and allowing simpler multi-site news subscriptions I think News is going to continue to grow profit and importance for Apple (3).
It's where I read 90% of my news now. It works with consistent UI+readability, it's way faster than the mobile versions hosted by pubs, and with minimal ad bloat. I highly recommend!
Though they might have potential FB-style think-alike algo problems with the love/hate data and personalization News does.
[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-ne... [2] https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/07/apple-news-user-numbers-nbcun... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-looks-to-expand-advertisi...
this is my biggest concern with it, and it sounds like they might be making changes to the interface to help:
> Apple News is redesigned to make it easier to discover new channels and topics or jump straight to favorites, and on iPad, a new sidebar makes navigation even simpler.
I recommend this move if you want to make an abandoned product line seem like it's at least a little bit alive.
Hardware announcements sometimes do happy at WWDC. I'm guessing they are not ready yet, so we just gotta hold out until fall event.
It also means the MacBooks will likely be shipping with a new keyboard, Coffee Lake and we will see 6 core/32GB variant for the 15inch.
I have no idea why even after the class action no one talks about how embarrassingly flawed their thin keyboards are.
Mine (EUR 1799 laptop) broke after 2 months, was fixed by Apple, then broke again. People I talked to experienced similar problems, with missing keystrokes, double letters, etc.
And we just saw a 6-core CoffeeLake MacBook Pro on Geekbench:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/03/benchmarks-hints-...
That sounds like they are unifying the two OS's to me, or I am mis-remembering the question Tim Cook answered with a definitive No?
This is nothing new. They've said things on stage that they've literally reversed on a year later.
You will be able to use UIKit to help port your apps across. But they aren't going to be merging all of the other parts of the OS together. Especially since iOS and OSX differ significantly in parts e.g. security posture.
Good old Apple.
The announcement only talks about iOS. What am I missing? Is it not up yet?
I'd like to say that I won't be getting another Mac in the future, though I can't honestly be sure of it. I'm already fully on Linux on my company laptop, but I own a few Mac-only apps that prevent me from going full Linux on my personal machine.
* I hate it that I can't open them up anymore
* That butterfly keyboard
* it got even more expensive (for a 15") (What we got back (the touchbar) has no added value for me)
* Windows can run Adobe tools and now has a subsystem for Linux.
* The Dell XPS line approaches MacBook quality pretty well and can be opened and is well supported under Linux should Adobe start to support it (hey, we are talking something like 2023 here, one can hope an Adobe Snap will be available by then, I think Adobe would rather like the Linux ecosystem.)
As said, I'm still very happy with a 7 y/o mbp because I upgraded it step wise. Though to be honest, I feel computer land stagnates a bit now that we finally found a solution for the hdd bottleneck, still there is little to fix yourself if anything gives out.
"macOS Mojave will be available this fall as a free software update for Macs introduced in mid-2012 or later, plus 2010 and 2012 Mac Pro models with recommended Metal-capable graphics cards."
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/apple-introduces-maco...
"macOS Mojave will be available this fall as a free software update for Macs introduced in mid-2012 or later, plus 2010 and 2012 Mac Pro models with recommended Metal-capable graphics cards."
Looks like it's the end of the road for my 2010 Mac mini running High Sierra. So long as Photos and Photo Stream continue to work, I'm not complaining. It was a good run.
Can’t quite remember the details but I think it’s even possible to bring it up to 2012 spec which will be supported in Mojave.
Either way, now I have a trashcan / hand warmer on my desk with a TB connected external drive cage with 2 mirror sets, and it makes me happy.
A Stocks app is trivial. There's been a Stocks Dashboard widget type thing for years and years.
Merging the OSes would mean revamping the macOS UI to be usable with touch screens, removing or drastically changing file access, etc.
It's not like iOS doesn't have a file system, they just don't allow you to access it.
The possibility of making a mess is too great.
Any data to support that complete falsehood?
It almost ruined them (desperately holding on to their drastically interior CPU). What could go wrong this time? Especially when they no longer have Steve running the show.
Didn't Windows (on desktop) ignore OpenGL in favor of DirectX for years to great success, because it was deeply integrated into the platform?
Yes, Apple's ecosystem is the same walled garden it's always been. Any time it wasn't was an anomaly. The best fanboy response I can give is that they seem MUCH more willing to work with partners this time around.
On the other hand, the way they currently display it has actually been praised for at least making it slightly easier to spot phishing attempts, since the only differences there would lie in the domain names (there are articles about it).
I can't believe I can be allowed to change the colours of the desktop after years of Jony Ive dictating/advising what my desktop should look like.
EDIT: Sorry, I didn't even read TFA. Wonder what they're talking about then.
I was baffled!
They really need to dumpster iTunes and break it up in several smaller apps.
It’s professionals and those that aspire to be professional who spend > £2,000 on a laptop.
I want decent UI (including keyboard shortcuts I can touch type), more features and better performance more than I want fluff like voice commands or anything-moji.
When thy said there another part of the platform they were ignoring I got excited for a moment.
I thought they bringing out an Apple official version of homebrew. Nope iOS apps.
Those reasons could be any number of things like not having native nvidia drivers, or lack of openGL support (which is completely deprecated in Mojave), etc...I'm happy to hear about their work on fortnite because currently my mac is overpowered for that game yet it is absolutely unplayable in its current state.
There are some games not available for MacOS but they seem to be less and less common. Almost everything now is cross platform, in part thanks to Unity making cross-platform games easy.
Most if not all of the Blizz games render using OpenGL. Heroes of the Storm used to have some experimental options to use Metal or OpenGL 4.1, however Blizzard got rid of them at some point. They seems to not be satisfied with Apple's drivers
They've been the biggest supporter of gaming on macos, and with them gone, the future is looking grim (for mac gamers - obviously a first world problem).
Changes to the app store to make discovery easier and feature more developer stories also have a huge impact on Mac/iOS developers and their revenue.
You still need to adapt it to native UI conventions like the menu bar, you just won’t need to rebuild the entire UI from the ground up in AppKit anymore.
Maybe Facebook will make a Mac client for Messenger (messenger.com works, but some people might prefer a desktop version). Maybe Netflix will have a Mac client (they already have one in the Windows store). We could get Google Maps as an alternative to Apple's native Maps app. Slack could throw away their Electron battery-guzzler and replace the Mac version with one based on the native iOS codebase.
Not every app wants or needs a Mac port, but there are plenty of cases where it could be useful.
I love apps that allow me to work on an iPad while I'm on the tube, then pick right up where I left off on the desktop. It’s the best of both worlds.
A good example is Bear Writer[0], a Markdown-based writing and notes app. The Mac app, while fully featured, is based on Electron. Without knowing anything about this new system I’d think these changes would allow the developers to create a native Mac app at least as easily as an Electron web app.
This is something pretty much everyone I know wants that has had both a Mac and iPhone.
There are great iPhone apps and they usually don't have a Mac version. You're stuck whipping out your phone to use some app even though you're already using your laptop.
They obviously can't put all the under-the-hood changes on the slides as there's probably a ton of stability fixes and hardening going on behind the scenes.
There are good iOS apps for a lot of things, if they can easily be adapted to run on the Mac as they demonstrated by porting the News app it can only be good for the ecosystem. The apps won't look like they are running in an iOS simulator and you use a mouse pointer to do touch actions. It'll be a normal native app that shares code with iOS.
Additionally, if I want to bring an iOS app to the Mac, then it'd be great to not have to figure out the Cocoa version of a certain UIKit view and then rewrite all of the code to fit.
I can't imagine this would translate to some next-level version of universal binaries, but who knows what it'll be like in a few years.
Developing for Mac? Abismal.
What do you feel is the problem? Primarily Xcode? I hear many people have issues with it, though I've not been a heavy enough user to notice anything particularly problematic.
You just can't release an app without constant maintenance. Apple has no problem innovating, even if it means pulling every developer along with them, ready or not.
This was essentially their sales-pitch demonstrating write-once run-anywhere codebase reducing the effort required to develop an app which can be built to run on both iOS and MacOS hardware.
But lately I’m on the fence wether some of this is really a free OS upgrade or really even fully justifies a full point release. Lots a hype for what imho used to be a 10.x.1 to 10.x.4 release.
And desktop icons might not be a huge deal, but I’m glad to see Apple acknowledging that they’re useful and continuing to improve it, in contrast with major Linux distros removing files from the desktop entirely.
For the Mac App Store, developers have been complaining about how subpar, useless, and stagnant it’s been for years. If the new version can drive customers to buy things, it’s a potentially big deal.
Personally my favorite features are dark mode, fingerprinting protection in Safari, and improved security of the camera/microphone and sensitive files.
UIKit will be a big deal for the Mac ecosystem when developers outside Apple get it next year.
What I wish, though, was that they themselves would get more excited about making MacBook Pro hardware improvements intended to drive people to upgrade to new MacBook Pros instead of seemingly trying to drive them to move on to iPads.
But otherwise, it's pretty cringy not only seeing them demo the new animoji stuff as well as people frantically clapping.
Because you don't see the vision that the developers in that room do. You're thinking about yourself. You're not thinking about Apple expanding its user base and making more customers available for its developers and their companies.
There was a lot of love in the keynote if you're a company looking at the bigger picture. If you're just a dev pounding on a keyboard, I can understand being less than impressed.
For “Hacker” news, many people seem very much “get off my lawn” and fail to see the future. They see stickers and teenagers but what they should be seeing is an entirely new and natural way to interact with the world. This is like rounded corners in 1981.
Apple could invent a flying car that reverses global warming and people would complain that the color scheme is just a touch too whimsical to be taken seriously. They’d complain about how Apple doesn’t support their cassette deck they had installed in their old Audi. They’d complain that real drivers shouldn’t need cup holders.
Do any of you people care about actual joy, delight or fun? Does anyone actually have the ability to imagine the future even a little bit? Must we be constrained to a monochrome CRT?
This tech is a small building block of the future and many of you dismiss it like it’s some gimmick. I know you guys wanted Craig to talk about performance and stability — but, if people actually knew anything about WWDC, you’d know that those topics get covered exhaustively throughout the week. The keynote is about big ideas and what is going to be possible. The smaller sessions are where the questions get answered and the spec sheets get explained.
It's an annual, incremental OS release. We're not talking about multi-year developments or grand visions. There are a bunch of features that look quite nice from a usability standpoint, some improvements to the App Store, and a crack at a unified development platform for iOS and macOS. Those seem like a pretty reasonable set of features to roll out, and no doubt they'll be accompanies by the usual array of more minor improvements.
The only thing we should really be hoping for is that they focus more on reducing the number of bugs, performance issues and security vulnerabilities.
OS X/macOS has had releases (since version 10.0) after:
0 months, 10.0 released
6
11
14
18
18
16
15
12
15
12
11
12
12 10.13 released
The WWDC technical sessions are about the changes that really matter.
We're Apple! We hate you, and you're going to keep buying it regardless."
Try to use the keyboard shortcuts to switch windows. Even if you always have a hand on the mouse/pad, your other hand can still be your keyboard commander.
If you’re convinced to keep using clicks to switch windows, look up the gesture to zoom out so you can see the whole windows and the click.
> Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.
Edit: There's also MoltenGL, so they could run OpenGL applications with Metal.
MoltenGL isn't FOSS so projects like Wine can't use it for instance.
High Sierra was supposed to be a polish release, and instead of stabilizing it Apple has added even more features.