“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)
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This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.
Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.
Modern wonders never cease!
I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards.
I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it sometimes can (sigh) on modern laptops.
While the <Alt-[a-z]> mapping is great and enabled by default, it does have the side effect of logging an extra key press based on the [a-z].
Though I use a fancy keyboard with QMK firmware, which allows customising this without needing to change settings on the computer.
I figure it's easier for people to remember now.
Whether it's good typing practice to use one hand for both the ctrl and the C, say, in a ctrl-c construct - I can't say.
I know that I rarely if ever use the right-hand control or alt keys (on a standard US-mode PC keyboard that has alt and control keys on both sides). I suspect this is poor form.
I'm not suggesting you just use a USB keyboard instead (although, now that I say it, that does seem like a solution).
What I'm actually wondering is how much work it would be just to create a single button that's an escape key on a USB stick that implements the USB keyboard protocol (but only ever reports that the escape key was hit).
If you have a suitable Arduino (or compatible) lying around probably not a lot of work: https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/language/functions/usb/k...
It would depend if "Escape" requires a specific non-standardized scan code or not. (Even if it did you could also try sending the Ctrl-[ variety instead.)
(It's even possible to get away with not using USB-specific hardware, like I did in the "old days": http://code.rancidbacon.com/ProjectLogArduinoUSB :D )
Random piece of keyboard trivia: On Mac OS X (and I assume current variants) each keyboard is a separate "entity" with e.g. separate state which includes caps lock state. This means that the USB "Capslocker" gag USB dongles that randomly toggled Caps Lock state didn't actually affect Macs.)
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/macbook-pro-stolen-sche...
Same with the stupid camera lens bump that is now ubiquitous across the iPhone. I just picture some engineer walking into his office to show him the iPhone 7 prototype, and he flips it over, runs his fingers over that bump, and fires the guy on the spot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
Now we have the company trying to undo 10 years of pushing everyone to go down the path that only WinDev can love, because apparently a large portion of the world rather write .NET (with its shortcomings) + DLLs than having to deal with COM boilerplate.
MacOS 10.0 and 10.1 were buggy messes, but the successors were pretty good. Shortly afterwards, MacOS 10.4 and 10.5 improved on it a great deal.
MacOS just kept getting better and better until sometime around Yosemite or El Capitan, with a small hiccup with Lion.
I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to Jobs and still working at Apple.
> Apple executive Eddy Cue sent an email in January 2011 to CEO Tim Cook... “I believe there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one,” Cue wrote in the email, which forwarded an article written by a reporter that switched from the iPad to a 7-inch Samsung tablet. “I tend to agree with many of the comments below,” Cue wrote.
> The email was introduced Friday during Samsung’s cross-examination of iOS chief Scott Forstall, who was among the recipients of Cue’s email. Forstall testified that Cue also used a 7-inch Galaxy Tab at some point... Steve Jobs was an outspoken critic of such tablets, saying that one would only be practical if it came with sandpaper to make people’s fingers smaller.
https://allthingsd.com/20120803/apples-eddy-cue-saw-market-f...
> I expressed this to Steve [Jobs] several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive the last time
https://www.digitalspy.com/tech/apple/a397538/apples-steve-j...
> This document is from Comes v. Microsoft (2007).]
Many people thought they'd be doomed without Jobs but they've seemingly been doing just fine still (ignoring many valid criticisms here, of course, but talking about the general population).
Which I really find fascinating. Aside from their arguably better stance on privacy, I don't really find there's much at all to love about Apple products beyond they look quite nice, generally. In fact I actively dislike a lot of the way they dumb down interfaces, but I acknowledge that's something the vast majority of users won't ever care about.
Is that really all there is to it? The consistency of aesthetic is enough to win? I've always found it to be an interesting question, why they continue to be so successful.
1) Landscape-shifting new product categories
2) Holistic, "scenario"-driven product design (as the author was advocating for)
#1 mostly died with Jobs, imo. But #2 seems to still have deep cultural roots at the company. They don't think in terms of component parts (at the hardware, software, UI, or any other level). They think in terms of making a device that a person can use for things they care about. They start from the top and work downward, everything else serving that ultimate end. Microsoft still doesn't do this, Google still doesn't do this.
That was enough on its own, but now 14 years of investing iPhone profits have added "sheer technical excellence" to the equation, giving them an additional edge.
Those are more advantageous features in smartphones than they are in desktop.
The products are 'good' but not that much better from a feature/function perspective. They look a little cleaner, nicer, but it's not really features that make them better.
Every employee rants, and thinks that 'the thing they are working on' is really important, and it's common that people think that the company has 'lost it's way' with this or that.
The fact is, the 'speed' of the file system on mac and windows isn't very relevant. It works, it's fast enough.
More paradoxically, the Windows UI's are a total confusing mess, always have been, and yet they've dominated on desktop forever.
The disconnect between the two worlds "people who use Apple products" and "people who think a day or so of your life is a reasonable amount of time to install an app that copies files over a network" is, well there's no way to cross that gap. And then you describe what Apple does as "dumbing down", for dumb people. People who don't want to care that SyncThing is written in Go instead of Java which means they can't access the Android API to write to an SD Card and the docs lead to a Github issue with 128 comments explaining why they aren't going to fix it. People who give their iCloud account login and Apple has their photos? Dumb people.
[I know people choose SyncThing to keep control locally and that often comes at a cost of more trouble, more effort. It's illustrative of very different worlds, that's all].
And then eventually, I just... got over it. There were other things I'd rather spend my finite energy on. I wanted my phone to do phone things and do them well, and without me having to think about it.
This hasn't been my experience
> Stock Android is just as mature and capable as ios
It's fine, but everything is just (imo) a little bit less cohesive and polished, and then there's the Google spyware, a shorter lifetime of updates, etc. And then if you aren't going off the beaten path and customizing stuff anyway, what are you actually gaining in exchange for those downsides?
I would add that when I had an Android phone I used the exact same strategies for transferring files.
It honestly sounds like you're getting upset about this relative to how you think it should work, and not relative to an actual practical barrier, so I'm going to withdraw from the conversation here
Typical irritating Apple fan response - "It's not the device, it's your fault for not using the device as Apple intended.
Everyone knows that Apple locks down its devices to only work well within its eco system. But many don't like the fact that it doesn't work as well as with other devices, and this is where Android (and other mobile OS) shine over ios. With less than 50% marketshare, Apple device users do often run into this problem with others who have a non-Apple device.
- Cheaper. You can get great cheap android based photos from a lot of vendors
- Free app / games. You can sideload anything. You can find free really indie unique apps/games .
- Just using a cellphone means you are tracked. Murder someone with your phone and they will be able to track you. Apple collects data on you. I don't like it but accept that I am being spied on on any phone.
I've put all that customization energy into my Linux VM, i.e. my programming environment. Time spent dicking around there always teaches me something and results in a somewhat more efficient setup. Time spent playing with an Android shell or launcher or icon theme or whatever was just...sunk time.
If you want to run the normal CLI-with-a-web-server Syncthing on Android, sure you could do that... but you could also much better serve your time by just having the Syncthing app with a native Android GUI with it. The day-project turns into a 5-minute project.
Us programmers want to believe that technology is enough. That just because because our implantation is technically superior in x, y and z metrics, consumers should be flocking to our solutions. But that’s not good enough. We have to get the technology right, and we have to make the product a joy to use.
As you said, there is a real disconnect between technical people and users. User-centered design tends to be treated with a kind of hostility. It’s often viewed as “dumbing down” rather than making the product better. I’m not sure why this disconnect exists, but until we close it, customers will continue to flock to closed ecosystem solutions.
The comparison is more like google drive, or whatever MS's version of that is now. At that point the distinction seems relatively minor to me.
If you take it more like "why do so many devs use macOS when they could have open source fully customisable Linux/BSD" which is in some ways their real "surprising" success given that they are more expensive and less customisable, the answer falls out in every HN thread about Apple - they build things which let people get on with their work. People get fed up of fighting suspend mode or wifi config or high-DPI displays or sound drivers or web video or breaking upgrades or regularly needing to edit config files to keep things basically working, and Apple makes all that go away. And that increasingly applies to Microsoft/Windows, people on HN often say things like "Win 10 ads in the start menu and telemetry is the last straw, I bought a Mac" or "I'm fed up of Windows update reboots interrupting me, I bought an M1 laptop", but they don't say nearly as much "I use macOS for the consistency of UI aesthetic". [Although people do say things like that about choosing iOS instead of Android]
Syncthing would compare to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, but it's the ecosystem and developer attitude towards users that I'm pointing to, not the file sync part. Apple walk the fine line between taking options away vs forcing you to deal with plumbing, easily well enough to keep their niche market share. "I actively dislike a lot of the way they dumb down interfaces, but I acknowledge that's something the vast majority of users won't ever care about." - including plenty of tech users who don't care.
Apple understands that technology is not enough. If you want consumers to want to use your products, you have to get the technology right, and you have to make the product a joy to use.
Most of us in this industry get the technology right, but treat the consumer joy (aka, amazing UX) as completely optional.
Unfortunately our industry is so metric-based, that we’re unwilling to make investments in intangibles like UX.
Or put in other words, metric-based was awesome, but then we decided to focus on wrong metrics.
Are you implying that there would have been reprisal? Because this whole thing happened just a couple years before a notorious incident where Jobs walked into a meeting and asked the Macbook team why the laptops were so inferior to iPads. He was notoriously critical of their own products.
I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for development. Windows is less than stellar for development generally (ignoring .net/c# things), I'd be grumpy using windows for development even if they offered a zillion dollars. WSL probably makes it okish, but is still new
But that changed rather quickly from 2016-2020. By the time I left I hadn't turned on that old desktop in months (unless I had to do some windows specific dev work) and could do nearly everything from the mac.
Sometimes I wish we could just tell these ignorant people get bent and figure it out. I'm not telling you to build goddamn Arch, it's just running a different piece of software. 100% of them didn't even ask to install it either.
I also personally think they picked osx because devs using windows probably won't care (since windows is already not great for dev), mac people are happy, and linux people are just glad they're not using windows.
(I'm personally in the "linux person relieved to not be using windows" camp).
No, they do not. If you bring your own device, you have to put it under control of the company using MDM software, pretty much the same way it works with company devices. Without MDM, none of the corporate resources are accessible, just like they shouldn't be.
What we _had_ to use was Teams, though... better than Skype for Business, lol. But definitely not Slack.
That said, I believe High Sierra is the last release before things start getting...weird? My wife has a newer Mac (cannot remember the release) but I had some pretty crazy hurdles to install an unsigned bit of software. If that’s the trajectory Apple is taking, I don’t think I will be ditching Linux for MacOS.
...that's where you and Apple have a difference in opinion
I'm similarly hesitant to lean in to additional oversight and control.
And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down like ios as that's more profitable for them in the longer run.
Anything to back this up? There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS, and I haven’t seen any evidence of a money grab with M1 based macOS either…
On Intel Macs, you can install Linux and Windows if you are unhappy with macOS. So they couldn't really lock it down. With their own custom ARM processors, they can prevent the installation of other OSes. Thus, like with iPhone or iPad, you will be stuck with the OS they provide. With the M1, so far you can only run other OSes on VM.
Windows... well... w2k was for companies or the enterprise, people followed Windows 98SE as if it was a cult and ME was a polished turd. W98SE was crap on security, FAT32's performance for an installed OS was a nightmare, having to defrag a lot and performance degraded a lot over time. You had to format and reinstall once a month. Oh, you need to reinstall the chipset, soundcard, and video drivers? Some BSOD on the process will be guaranteed.
Linux and KDE by 2004 was nice, but broadband wasn't everywhere and setting it up was not as easy if all you got from a retailer was a Slackware/Debian DVD with an installing book. For everything else you had to be ready to learn a lot. And X.org wasn't as ready as today.
OFC my KDE3 setup from 2004 with bells and whistles like the Nvidia Geforce 2 drivers was nearly on par on OSX' features, (even with Cinelerra and JackD) but OSX set it up everything for you by default since 2001-2002.
Even Microsoft Office under OSX looked beatiful.
And today, ironically, I'm almost the opposite, by using CWM, void, OpenBSD, groff+ms, sc-im, Gnuplot and so on.
But to each its own. OSX by being a Unix helped Linux/BSD's a lot too, even if it took a huge chunk of market. CUPS polishing, (CUPS ofc worked pefectly in 2003 without Apple's support, but I think Apple gave them more support on weird printers), Bonjour, HTML->Webkit...
Professional printed papers/music and video production = Mac. Period. No one would say otherwise in the 90' s.
But with OSX you had both the media/press people and the science people in your pocket. (Unix sysadmins with KSH, Unix utilities and SSH ready from the beginning, maybe not as a server but you could test all crap locally, and well, Aqua looked shiny, fun and shit would work; and for die hard C/C++/Perl/X11/Motif programmers porting legacy scientific tools to Xquartz and Motif with barely any changes).
And OFC, LaTex, with some GUI's showing the PDF preview.
If that was all it took, Sun Microsystems would still be alive too.
Part of the reason why moving Windows forward with Backward compatibility is so god damn hard.
It's like that Iraqi general saying US troops were nowhere near the capital.
What I'm imagining is that after Balmer throws my mac across the room I pull out my second mac. I would also be scouting for someone who can install an airbag into my mac. Like, can you imagine the look on Balmer's face when he throws your mac and an airbag explodes out of it? Then you can just say, "What? Laptop airbags come standard on macs."
To reiterate, it does sound like a terrible situation to have to work in. But unbridled anger on the part of another is the perfect opportunity to create some incredibly comedic scenarios if you're willing to put in the elbow grease.
As with most Windows versions, it was pretty solid by Service Pack 1. By 7 pretty much everything had been ironed out and consequently we remember 7 as the highest water mark since the peak, Win2k.
I think this is the video mentioned:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040108215755/apple.com/ilife/v...
Longhorn was planned to be a dramatic follow-up version of Windows XP in which the Windows shell was rewritten on top of .NET with three main pillars: communication (WCF), presentation (WPF), and data (WinFS). WinFS was a new filesystem based on a relational database engine (SQL Server).
Longhorn was similar to a previous failed Windows release (Cairo). Longhorn was built on .NET whereas Cairo was built on COM. Longhorn used a new filesystem based on SQL whereas Cairo had a new object-oriented file store. Longhorn use Avalon for the shell with concepts for people/contacts whereas the Cairo used Outlook. Before it became an Office application, Outlook started life as the new Cairo shell in which emails, calendars, task were integrated into explorer. You could do advanced grouping, tagging, and filtering on files. In fact, the first version of Outlook, Outlook 97, as an Office application allowed you to view the file system just like emails.
Longhorn was several years late before the Windows release was canceled with no clear end date in sight.
A reset was directed to produced an incremental new release of Windows called Windows Vista. It would be purely native and ship in a year and a half.
The .NET dependency "Bet on .NET" was jettisoned, and all Window's dependencies needed to be fully released rather than works in progressed. WCF, WPF were released independently. WinFS was killed because it was too slow.
Which kind of was, had the respective teams not botched the whole idea with WinRT, UAP, UWP, replacing C++/CX with toolless C++/WinRT, left .NET Native stagnate,....
So now we get WinUI, Reunion sorry AppSDK, and the whole marketing with deemphasis on the COM love of WinRT high marketing push.
I feel if there was some actual real cooperation across all the business units instead of the feudal wars, either Cairo or Longhorn would have worked out quite well.
What to expect when it was easier for contractors to navigate across units, then asking for stuff directly.
Ok, I got the point that they decided to stop doing language extensions and C++/CX was a dead end.
Surely the PM that signed the idea to replace C++/CX, could have spent one minute considering not to ship a development experience that is worse than MFC.
In 30 years haven't they had time to add syntax highlighting and code completion to IDL files?
Ah, and the Windows team then ignores C++/WinRT on their own samples, and use their own internal WIL framework instead.
https://github.com/microsoft/wil
So you get some samples on MSDN now that after being rewritten from C++/CX into C++/WinRT, are also tainted with WIL library types
I do Web development alongside native, and would never pick Electron unless obliged by customer requirements to act accordingly.
What to just use HTML/CSS/JS instead of the native OS capabilities?
Use Web widgets, PWAs, daemons/services with local browser UI.
No need to install hundreds of Chrome instances, and have them run in parallel.
If you go with daemons/services with local browser UI, you can even use microservices and a distributed cluster for your app, what about that?
Maybe it is worth of an HN blog post.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20070107170621/http://windowsvist...
I mean he’s calling Vista a “phenomenal product”, for Fourier’s sake
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
You can buy a Mac today even if you are working at Microsoft.
If you think about windows only, between windows XP and a recent windows 10, it's very different and much better. It's possible to use the computer while an application is using all available resources now. You also have descent composting with GPU accelerated 3D effects and good windows management. Good touch screen support too. Also much better security, and a great Linux integration with WSL.
I actually prefer a lot of things in Windows than Mac today. I think Mac OS is a bit behind windows on some features I use, like touchscreen support or the Linux integration. But the good hardware makes it worth it since the M1.
About the touchscreen support, it's simply that I like touchscreens. It think it's more convenient for some usages and I think Apple acknowledged that with their ridiculously small touch bar. I hope they will allow real professional usage on the iPad pro or bring touch screen support to the MacBook eventually. I could live without it but I still touch my MacBook screen by mistake once in a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/21/eric-schm...
But yes, it is a bit of a different time as well, but I think Allchin the person is a pretty important part of the statement.
No? It was a very smooth rollout (even more impressive if you consider it also rolled out to all iOS devices). I can’t think of a similarly large technical change that went so smoothly.
There are things to complain about with the software quality of Macs, but the file system isn’t one of them in my opinion.
The Longhorn project did include an attempt at doing a fancy new filesystem, more database flavoured; I'm not sure if they ever finalized the feature list, much less got it working, and now everything ships with NTFS which is slow but reliable.