allenu

I've learned not to trust company technical blogs. They're all just marketing fluff intended to act as recruiting materials, and judging by the comments here, it's working. As your post highlights, taken in the greater context, it sounds like their decision to move to React Native was so slow going and the end-user experience is just okay.

I suppose taken from the perspective of "We want to easily hire frontend devs that can easily be slotted in to work on the project and make impact on all platforms, including mobile" then it's a win, but at a cost in years and a degraded user experience. From a business perspective, probably a good move in the long run.

I can imagine also that in some situations where there's a large volume of work to be done and you don't need a high performer to get some of it done, you'd rather have the low performer than nobody in that position so you can make progress.

> I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?"

This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.

I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.

In junior high, we had to memorize and recite a poem in front of the class and this was one of the choices available to us. It's the one I chose, so it holds a special place for me.

The teacher who taught our class was probably one of the best teachers I've ever had. She was tough but fair and so you really wanted to impress her 'cause she knew what you were capable of. When you're a teenager, having an adult treat you with respect but call you out when you fell short of your own standards goes a long way.

That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some necessary patent licenses.

I'm a big fan of prototyping to explore a problem space. I think some initial design sketches are useful, but you often reach a point where you can only learn by implementing. I've encountered so many design constraints in the past that I couldn't have planned for, but perhaps others are better at comprehensively thinking through a problem space than I can.

I agree with the blog post that doing a hacky solution is very helpful to understand the problem space better, although I think it's something that's challenging in an organization. In a lot of orgs, it might be viewed as a waste of time to work on something hacky. It could also come across as wasting people's time by engaging in too many discussions over PRs. People want shipping solutions today, not explorations that might need to be rewritten later. Asking for feedback might also come across as someone being unsure of a solution and needing "help" on it.

The dynamics of working in a team generally nudge devs to make more conservative moves and writing more up-front design docs, which will be slower and safer. I'm not arguing that's a bad thing, though. You need the documentation to communicate intent across an org and many other people will need to pick up the work, too. A PR may not provide enough space to comprehensively explain the overall design.

As an indie dev now, I find sketching some designs, followed by prototyping, then "massaging" the prototype into a working, shippable solution the ideal workflow. However, it only works because I'm solo and don't need to worry about getting an okay on potentially risky solutions or having to communicate and get buy-in on implementations. In a company that has lots of other devs and lots of paying customers, I wouldn't be able to do things that way, and for good reason.

I'll admit I was expecting an explanation of how to extract sprites from retro video game footage using FFmpeg, which I can see totally being possible with a bit of work.

I agree. I think I listen to podcasts just for a bit of "social noise" when I'm doing something by myself and for occasionally picking up on something new I hadn't heard of before. For pure information content, I think they're actually very poor. It's not unlike listening to an old AM radio talk show. Hosts repeat themselves, engage in banter, and often oversimplify topics for the sake of a narrative.

I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.

It's definitely more practical for headphones. I'm curious as to why Apple decided to make this change now. Previous Mac Minis and the Mac Studios have always had them in the back. It seems uncharacteristic of them to go out of their way for wired headphone users after they removed the port entirely from the iPhone, so I wonder if it was a hardware/industrial design thing where it was simply more convenient to move it to the front for the new form factor.

Edit: also I noticed they moved the power button to the bottom corner of the Mac Mini! (It used to be on the back as well.) This makes me think even more that they didn't want to crowd up the back too much.

Very cool to see this implemented. I had a similar idea to build a timeline-based site like this where people could create their own timelines to share, and not just for journalism.

One idea I had that you might be thinking about already is making it possible to create different versions of timelines. That is, if I see a timeline, I could fork it and make my own copy that I could edit, i.e. remove some entries if it I'm trying to highlight key events or add my own observed events. That way, you wouldn't necessarily need to reach a consensus on a specific timeline, but you could still trace the lineage of different versions of timelines.

In terms of UX, I thought something similar to https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ would be a good starting point to allow for lots of information on the page.

Looking forward to seeing how this site develops! Best of luck.

Yeah, good point about the HDMI carrying the audio from the back already. I think I’m out of touch since I use an old receiver that doesn’t have HDMI. It’s funny that this is the one place Apple considered the convenience to its wired headphone users.

Putting the audio jack on the front is a strange design choice to me if you plan on hooking it up to wired speakers all the time. Did they run out of space to keep it in the back?

That was my reaction as well to seeing the name. It makes me think of both ambulance and amputate, which are not good associations.

I love Inkscape as well. It took some getting used to at first, but now I can sketch things rather quickly with it. The lag on macOS and non-standard UI behaviors are really frustrating though.

For example, for the longest time, if you put the cursor in a text field and then hit cmd-A to select all text, it would interpret that to mean select all objects in the canvas instead. Another thing is that sometimes when I click and drag the corner of the window to resize it, the thing just won't budge. It takes several attempts before it actually works. Very frustrating, but it's open source and gets the job done for the most part, so it's very hard for me to move away from it.

It's something I noticed at the start of the pandemic. Since we no longer had in-person social events or do simple things like get together for lunch as a team, work felt far more transactional to me. I had less connection to people I worked with since I wasn't in the same physical spaces and couldn't communicate in more human, non-verbal ways. The fact that you had to plan meetings or phone calls added even more to the transactional nature since now you could track when and how often you were communicating with others.

I also felt like I had to over-emote on Zoom to make sure people saw my reaction since I was just a tiny box on their screen.

On the whole, I think remote work made it clearer to employees that their relationship to their job was truly transactional, and I think companies recognize that and that's probably one reason why many want people back in the office.

I'm not sure about this particular event, but companies often have employees who worked on the products in the crowd during launches to provide even more crowd noise.

That reminds me of a few months into the pandemic, one of the VPs at the company I was working at was presenting in a Zoom-based all-hands. I remember that he was very clearly looking directly into the eye of the camera as opposed to looking at his monitor's video feed like everyone else. I remember thinking that it felt a little bit weird and unnatural and very performative, like a politician, since he very obviously intentionally wanted to come across as more human by looking directly at the audience, although at the same time it was a fake look since he wasn't looking directly into the eyes of any one person, but a camera.

Perhaps other people didn't think about it as deeply as I did and maybe it did have the intended effect, but I remember I didn't see him or anyone else doing the same thing in any future all-hands.

I had the same issue when I was in an office and we were getting close to a deadline, so everyone was constantly chatting about this and that to unblock themselves. It's understandable when the rhythm of the office gets to that point that people want answers now, but it would get to ridiculous levels where you couldn't focus for 10 minutes before somebody else came by with a question.

I never got to the point of having a USB light as a semaphore or anything like that, but I really wanted to find and hack a toy traffic light that would indicate if it was a good time to interrupt me or not. So yeah, it was a very real problem.

I agree, or else you're going to see the film again in person for the experience of being in a theater with a whole bunch of other people and seeing it on a very big screen. I don't think the draw for me to see a film again in the theater is the fact that there will be an intro discussion on it. That just seems like pure marketing to give a value-add to the experience, but I doubt most people going are there for that.

These autoplay features make me a little anxious. If I'm browsing through movies, I just want to read the description in peace and not have to worry that the trailer or movie itself will start playing. It makes me click Next more quickly than I would want just to avoid the countdown timer expiring.

I had a similar experience when I popped in an old DVD of Star Wars (i.e. A New Hope) recently. If I recall correctly, there are some short clips and audio that play as part of the intro before you even get to the main menu, and it includes the famous John Williams theme. I hadn't seen the movie in ages, so I wanted to go in fresh, and this totally ruined the experience.

I had the opposite experience when I popped in another old DVD, this time Amadeus. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when it literally started playing from the very beginning of the movie. No DVD menu or previews at all. It just felt so good to go straight to the story.

A lot of discussions about stopping drinking leave out precisely how much the person was drinking before. I can understand why, of course, but it does make it difficult for "non-drinkers" to grok how big the change could be on a person's health.

Thankfully for me, I've never been a heavy drinker, maybe having 1 or 2 beers in a period of a week or two, at most. I don't really hang out with heavy drinkers, so it surprised me when friends would mention they were drinking several alcoholic beverages a night regularly. I suppose it changed how I viewed discussions of people getting off alcohol. They've got a bigger hurdle to get over to stop drinking that much and would definitely see a big change on their health and their budget. If I stopped having it at all, I probably would not notice a difference.

I did about ten years ago and danced weekly for 5+ years (swing dancing). I joined classes alone and it went totally fine. You make friends in the class and if you go dancing regularly, you see the same people, so you start forming a community. Best of all, people who go to the dances are there to dance and not get drunk, so it's a great, safe way to meet other people who want to socialize, too.

I stopped going regularly after a little over 5 years, mostly because I was plateauing in my dancing and getting bored with it. In my experience, you plateau multiple times, just as with any skill, but you find a way to get better and more creative, but at that point, my heart wasn't into improving anymore so I wasn't enjoying it as much. I definitely keep telling myself to get back into it, however, because it's such a great social outlet.

I'll also add that it's a really great activity because it's physical, it's creative, and it's social. Partner dancing forces you to learn how to work with other people and communicate better. Not everyone you dance with has the same skill level and you might think you're doing well communicating (when you're leading) but after dancing with several people you find out right away where you're not doing a good job.

I also did find that it made me more aware of my movements and improved my musicality. I got better at watching other people dance and seeing what movements they made and how they choreographed their "routines". That kind of tickled a different part of my brain I hadn't used before in any other activity. The "plateauing" I mentioned earlier forced me to get better at watching others and repeating what they did as well as seeing what I was doing and trying to change it up if it was getting stale.

That picture makes it look even cuter to me, like it’s a Pixar character.

It won’t win any beauty contests but I like that they put function over form here.

Edit: corrected my phrasing about function over form. Thanks!

I came across a few blog posts hosted on the site, but I always just assumed it was a blog hosting site. I suppose from a marketing angle, it didn't make an impression on me as to why I would use it over anything else.

I think it's useful as a tool for browsing a getting a general gist of what people are into and seeing if your favorites are there, too. As for a tool to maximize one's reading list, certainly not as useful, but I appreciate that it didn't make me feel like I had to create action items on things to read.

It (note-taking tools) really is a big thing among this cohort. I think there’s this deep belief that if you just had the right organizational system, you could get more done and be more productive. Having gone down that line of thinking before, I get the appeal, though I think it’s overrated when it comes to actually being productive. But man it feels good to play with new toys.

I still use digital tools for documenting my projects and keeping track of long-term tasks, but I agree with the author that papers just fucking works for most things. I sketch out designs on paper. I treat as an ephemeral medium.

Lately I’ve taken to jotting down lists of things on my mind on index cards so I can carry those around and refer to them without the distraction of a phone. The nice thing is that space is limited, so I can’t take on too much at a time. Constraints are a good thing.

Thanks for the interest. It's definitely not at the level of polish as Day One yet. I used to use Day One years ago when it was still a one-time purchase app, but even back then it had nice things like recording your location and local weather conditions. I'd love to add simple niceties like that eventually.

I'm trying to position my app less like a traditional journal and more of a "jot down quick thoughts" place, hence the social media-like interface. But I also want to add more zettelkasten-like features as well, so it's kind of a shoebox app for whatever you want to keep track of for later.

I'm working on Minders [1], a journaling/notes app. I've been using it for a little over a year for daily journaling and keeping track of interesting links or ideas. It works like a Twitter feed of just your thoughts.

It's been fun to work on as I can throw in whatever neat ideas I want since I'm not trying to fit it into a neat category. For instance, I was experimenting with a multi-column browsing experience after I saw a post here [2] for inspiration. The UI could work like TweetDeck but for your notes. Not 100% sure yet if it works, but I'll be doing more prototyping.

Right now I'm revamping the sync system and other runtime parts as I'm realizing that once you start amassing lots of posts, it gets bogged down a bit. I probably could've architected some of it a bit better at the start, but I tend to try to release stuff as early as I can to force myself to ship and to see what people think.

1. https://minders.ussherpress.com/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263203