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Comment by lemontheme | Hacker News Reader

Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple Shortcut

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AppleScript was just a little weird but I could get my head around it. Shortcuts just doesn’t make sense. Even the simplest things are hard to do and the scripts are totally unmaintainable. I don’t know why Apple is doing this.

I got my first MacOS device, a Macbook Air, recently and was annoyed to find the toggle for 'natural scrolling' is unified between the trackpad and the mouse. I use the macbook docked 90% of the time. So, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to script toggling the natural scrolling setting. ChatGPT immediately produced a working script and the instructions to create the Shortcut and assign it to a keyboard shortcut. Now I can press Ctrl-Shift-S and toggle natural scrolling.

Even as a programmer, I would have never spent the time necessary to learn the relevant scripting language for this task. I've got other things to do. But ChatGPT knew exactly what to do and now to implement the task, even on the newest version of MacOS.

There exists free tools that fix that behaviour too (Apple hasn't seemed to care because if you buy a mouse from them, it scrolls with a touch sensor so natural scrolling feels correct. And I do happen to be one of the few people who likes the Magic Mouse)

As an alternative to a script, I can suggest Mos[1], which i've been using for 6 years I think. This is the first app I install on a fresh MacOS because I'm also using my MacBook while it's docked.

[1]: https://github.com/Caldis/Mos

I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.

Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work properly several years later.

(I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were. Win some, lose some.)

[0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-laden bloat sites "reviewing" it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read though.

This is what prevents me from putting any effort in to shortcuts. I have zero confidence in Apple respecting my time by committing to compatibility or even just not breaking things. The constant feature churn from new PM’s tearing down Chesterton’s fence to make way for their own career ambitions makes Apple user hostile.

Apple doesn’t respect its users with constant changes to iTunes and then Music. My wife is still mad that after redoing her 12,900 songs, and correcting Meta Data, Apple Music said your wrong and changed at least 10% of her music in some way.

It feels actively hostile to programmers sometimes

Not just sometimes. Pretty much always.

I always suspected there's a step in Apple's software design process that goes like this:

- Is the app convenient to use for power users? Then careful, you must have mindlessly went with what's intuitive for you, but what's actually intuitive for normal people is, has to be, different. Go back and find (or invent if you must), the "naturally" intuitive design.

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