Comment by alin23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alin23 | Hacker News Reader

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Users of my monitor control app (https://lunar.fyi/) feel overwhelmed with the information I provide on the website and in little help hints placed in the app near each setting.

If an app has this effect, I can't even imagine what an OS manual would feel like in these days.

I wish I could provide a proper manual but I can barely keep up with updating the app website with the rate of change in technologies. A major OS upgrade would need an army of writers to update manual on time.

Not that I wouldn't love it. It would be tremendously useful to have a PDF where I can Cmd-F obscure tidbits which I often need in building MacOS apps.

I just think it's impractical given the complexity of software in this age.

I don't even think it's the complexity, necessarily. More of the fundamental instability of it all. Why exactly does Mac or Windows need to be releasing entirely new OSes every 2 years, except to maintain a new product for the demands of a corporate behemoth to chirp around. People have PERL scripts from 40 years ago that still execute fine, but I doubt anyone has a PowerShell file from the early 2010s that maintains behavior.

I can't comment on Windows, but with regards to apple, they really don't. Sure they strut around like they have but really, they've tweaked some user apps like Mail and Safari, and made bug fixes under the covers. Every now and then they do something like muck with background scheduling, but mostly... it's just bug fixes and new APIs that don't invalidate old ones.

The only problem I've had is dylib files relentlessly moving forward in versions and old ones not being available anymore, but i don't _think_ that's really an apple problem. That and the M1 architecture transition has moved some folders around for reasons I don't understand.

My ancient scripts still work just fine.

It’s not impractical for Apple and Microsoft literally does it. I’m not saying MSDN is perfect, but it’s a very expansive and thorough documentation of (almost) everything in Windows.

The only difference is that people like to make excuses for Apple.

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