Comment by rahoulb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rahoulb | Hacker News Reader

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It may be hard to believe now, but there was a time when iTunes was a great piece of software. It used to have two jobs - play your music and manage your music - and it had a good UI for both tasks.

iTunes had a "brushed metal" interface - the Apple HIG said brushed metal was for apps that represent "devices", as opposed to standard "Aqua" (or "Platinum" if you go back far enough) for apps which represent "documents" - and in the top-right corner was a recessed "iris". When you put a blank CD into the drive, then clicked the iris with a playlist selected, the iris animated opening, revealing a glowing yellow and black "Burn" button (using this same icon). You clicked the glowing button and your playlist would be burnt to CD.

Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive), so the "safety cover" iris and the animation revealing the button underneath used to delight me every time I used it.

Please stop describing something I remember experiencing like yesterday the same way they talk about ox ploughs at a pioneer village museum.

Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...

“The dinosaurs of our youth had mounted pigeon boxes below the saddle. Messages could be exchanged on the go through…”

I was having an awful time yesterday using a white noise file to drown out office sounds. My Bluetooth connection kept dropping for a few ms and the white noise would cut to silence. So I rooted around and found the proper analog cable for my Bose to plug in to the MacBook Pro.

No hole.

How did you plug it in without a hole?

I had a Bluetooth headset for my Palm Treo 650 actually. But I think I still had to sync it via USB.

My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where the cabinets were cooled with air conditioning popes that ran under the raised floor.

The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were used to lift floor tiles up to access the cabling and AC running under the floor. Because of the AC, the space under the floor was cold. And that’s where they stored the beer, or a can of root beer for the kid who was hanging around writing simple programs.

I remember that like the day-before-yesterday, but to everyone else it’s as like telling an anecdote about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage commenting on your pull request against the Difference Engine.

Ah, I remember the old machine room days. (and I love the typo of air-conditioned popes). A few years ago, my department had a field trip to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield data center in Waukegan for a tour. So unlike the machine rooms of yore, although they did have an IBM big metal machine up there alongside all the rack-mounted servers (and even that was tiny compared to the old IBM mainframe I used to work with at UIC back in the 80s).

I used to use Disco, the website is still alive: https://discoapp.com

When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.

Blowing the smoke away is a great touch.

I miss that kind of thing - the closest we get nowadays is when things bounce or shake a little bit as you interact with them.

I guess this is what Gruber was talking about recently - stuff that wouldn't go on a spreadsheet of features but make you want to use the app just because it does stuff like this.

Another similar example, blowing into the microphone would spin the title name around on 3ds games (and poking/blowing at random things in game would sometimes do fun stuff too!)

Those tiny details and fun little things here and there are what people remember in 10-20 years. I wish developers did them more

I suspect these things happened because of waterfall development style. If you finish the product with time before the launch date, you can add in some fun.

Now, everyone uses Agile-ish, and software is NEVER finished. You always have a backlog. Those are always going to be more important to your PM than an Easter Egg.

Similarly, there used to be a haxie[0] that could hook Carbon apps and make it so if there were any progress bars in a window, once the progress bar reached 100% progress the "water" in it would begin to overflow and fill the window. Completely pointless but fun.

[0]: A formalized way to distribute code injection hacks for the purpose of user customization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity

is the website still alive? getting a bad certificate and if I push past it I get a "Coming Soon"

I guess a mac only application for disk burning becomes a bit pointless when there’s no macs with disc drives any more.

Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.

Unless you have a Pioneer drive and macOS 13.2

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...

Burning discs, even from an M1 Mac, works just fine. I burned a CD just the other day.

there’s no macs with disc drives any more

The drives still exist. They're just optional now. Like bucket seats.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super...

Best optical drive I own. When nothing else will read a crusty disc, the SuperDrive always does.

Fun fact. That's the oldest product they still sell as it was introduced with the original MacBook Air in 2008. They've done literally nothing to it and it sill comes with a USB A cable despite most of their computers not having one at all. It also is pretty bad value these days when a Blu-ray writer costs about the same.

It depends on what you're using it for. I have a couple of Blu-Ray drives, and they're much more finicky than the SuperDrive.

When a disc won't read or write in my Pioneer drive, I try it in my no-name Blu-ray drive, and when that fails, I try it in the SuperDrive, and it always works.

I consider something that works reliably 99% of the time to be a better value than something that works 80% of the time.

I'd wager they are just selling whatever inventory they have yet, and it'll never get a USB-C refresh.

I have an external BDXL burner sitting on top of my Mac Studio. It’s a real shame they couldn’t find space internally for such a thing.

At the bottom of this page is a picture of the "Burn CD" button:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/audio_only_fcp_cd.html

> Burning a CD was an expensive operation (both in time and compute, as it slowed the machine down, plus it tied up your CD drive)

Discs were also decently expensive then as well, so financially expensive too. Not prohibitively so, but not like today where a failed disc is just a coaster not a headache. This may have been near the cusp of when that balance shifted, but I remember quite a bit of angst when I was a young'in burning mix discs for my Discman.

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