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barrowclift

138 karma · joined April 1, 2015

Human Interface Designer, Web Developer, and Computer Scientist

https://barrowclift.me/social

submissionscomments
barrowclift··on macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess
Thank you for this; this has been driving me nuts the past week and it never once occurred to me it might be a genuine issue with the new OS and not my double-click muscles beginning to fail.
barrowclift··on How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
The article isn't "about" ModRetro, please engage with the actual material instead of off-topic political tirades.
barrowclift··on The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls
What serendipity, I've just begun my own play through a few days ago after having learned of the game (as most of those in North America have) through the Link's Awakening cameo. It's thoroughly charming, makes me sad it never enjoyed a proper release outside of Japan.

If any readers here have an interest in retro gaming or (like me) loved Link's Awakening back in the day, I highly recommend giving it a look.

barrowclift··on John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
I'm seeing your comment's downvoted, I'd like to hear from those that did as to why. Doesn't his current venture with his AGI startup Keen Technologies deserve being called out as a potential conflict of interest, here?
barrowclift··on Apple OSes Are Insecure by Design to Aid Surveillance (2024)
This article is in fact from 2023, the only thing from 2024 was an update on 03-11 that confirms the detected issue was addressed in macOS 14.3.1 (and likely earlier versions).
barrowclift··on An unsolicited streaming app spec
I've found the heuristics streaming apps use to determine whether or not to show "play next episode" or "continue watching" to be very hit or miss (sometimes due to a bad heuristic, other times due to a given episode having an unusual end point). Providing an accessible means for the user to quickly course correct when this heuristic inevitably breaks would be handy.

As a concrete example, I frequently find Funimation's app recommends I "continue watching" an episode that I'd consider already completed, and unfortunately the quickest way to "fix" instead of backing back out and browsing around is to frantically scrub through to the end so it auto-plays to the next episode.

barrowclift··on Apple doesn't care about album cover art
I think this all ties back to listening habits. I find individuals who share this opinion are typically stream-primary listeners who mostly listen to playlists, singles, and generated "radio" stations (which is entirely valid! Not to mention that's the way most people listen to music, nowadays.)

However, there are nonetheless lots of people like myself that primarily listen to albums, maintain their own digital libraries, and use streaming platforms as a glorified "trial" platform for new music. I find those who tend to listen to music like I do really care about high resolution album art (and by extension the quality and accuracy of track metadata).

Frankly, since both needs are so widely different, I'm not sure there's any one solution for both. Goodness knows Apple Music tries, but to OP's point, it's clearly not succeeding in this effort.

barrowclift··on The Quest for the Perfect Dark Mode (Gatsby/React)
Not necessarily true, I'd argue the "perfect" dark mode uses the system's theme by default like you said, but still allows visitors to manually set light or dark should they wish to view the site a particular way (perhaps they prefer the light mode, etc.)
barrowclift··on Firefox 75.0
If nothing else, I really appreciate the summary, with all the comments and various threads on this it's a bit hard to follow exactly what the hold up is.
barrowclift··on Firefox 75.0
And still no movement on finally getting Bug 1178764 out the door, despite every other major browser supporting it. Nope, instead they'd rather faff about with the address bar to resounding universal disgust.

[Bug 1178764]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1178765

barrowclift··on Warming Up to Unit Testing
Bit of a disappointing read for me. Given the title, I was expecting more "meat" to the topic, like more details about why and how the author is now warming up to unit tests, anything to get the article beyond a surface-level summary of events. Right now, it simply reads "I didn't previously unit test, then I read some books, and now I do".

Seems to me writing like this is best served with a few book recommendation tweets and doesn't really make sense in this format.

barrowclift··on Big Ball of Mud (1999)
Funnily enough, I recognize this image from The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" soundtrack liner notes (the image itself is from the movie). Why it's included in this article is lost on me.
barrowclift··on “MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story (2017)
Previous discussion from May 16, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347648
barrowclift··on iOS 13's Music App Sucks
Whoa, that's bad. I don't currently have an Android device to test with, but I will get an emulator set up this weekend to see if I can reproduce and fix whatever's causing this. Thanks so much for letting me know about this, I really appreciate it!
barrowclift··on iOS 13's Music App Sucks
Thanks for the kind words, Sam :) Unfortunately, I don't believe there's any third-party offering on iOS that supports downloading music within the app from Apple Music or Spotify, I'm fairly certain you'd need to kick off downloads from the first-party player itself. If any folks here are aware of a third-party player that does support this, I'd be interested to know as well.
barrowclift··on iOS 13's Music App Sucks
While I agree iOS 13’s Music.app is pretty shoddy in many respects, there’s plenty of alternatives other than Spotify that might better fit their requirements. (Marvis Pro, Soor, etc.)

I consolidate the biggest players yearly in a review, which might be helpful for the author’s search: https://barrowclift.me/post/second-annual-ios-music-player-c...

barrowclift··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
That's fascinating, I didn't realize that key serves multilingual support in some countries. Is that the standard configuration in China or a common setting for that key there?
barrowclift··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
That makes sense, I didn't even consider that some folks already have the key bound to something else.
barrowclift··on 16-inch MacBook Pro
Genuinely curious, why did so many developers ask for the return of the physical Escape key when you could easily re-map it to caps lock? Before this was an officially supported option, I always hated having to do big hand-shimmies every time I needed to press the escape key, which is quite often for programs like vim!
barrowclift··on Tokyo's 2D Cafe
Shoot, I didn't read the titles correctly enough; you're absolutely right, they're two completely different cafes. Thanks for the correction!
barrowclift··on Tokyo's 2D Cafe
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21322807

EDIT: I was wrong, the previous discussion was for a similarly styled cafe in Korea, whereas this one is in Tokyo.

barrowclift··on Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet
Not OP, but my use cases don't really require "traditional" extensions; 1Blocker and the Instapaper button are all I really need and want for day to day browsing, so improved extension support on other browsers doesn't add any value for me.
barrowclift··on This is not a 3D drawing, it's a restaurant in Korea
Neat, but in my opinion this kind of content doesn't really belong here. From the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

barrowclift··on Ask HN: What are some well-designed, but less well-known native Mac apps?
Paw is hands-down the best REST app one I’ve ever used, and it’s a glorious, native macOS app. If you have any use for such a thing, give it a look.
barrowclift··on Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin and other blockers for Safari
While not a right-click, 1Blocker for macOS Safari does indeed a support "block this element" feature with their extension.
barrowclift··on Show HN: NextStep – Product to help SaaS companies improve conversion rates
With a derivative name and derivative marketing/design, this just blends in easily with the crowd. This desperately needs a brand refresh to have any chance of leaving a lasting impression on potential customers.
barrowclift··on Show HN: NextStep – Product to help SaaS companies improve conversion rates
Absolutely not just you, this is the same style abused by a comical number of different service websites nowadays because it happens to be the latest fashion fad:

  * Plaid — https://plaid.com  
  * Airtable — https://airtable.com  
  * Blogsend — http://blogsend.io  
  * Twist — https://twist.com  
  * Humaaans ("dopey cartoon people" as a design product) — https://www.humaaans.com/  
  * Personas ("dopey cartoon people" as an avatar) — https://personas.draftbit.com/
Thankfully, this awful trend seems to be going out of favor, because the following services' websites have recently refreshed off it:

  * Pastel (recently refreshed their site) — https://web.archive.org/web/20180203192541/https://usepastel.com/  
  * User Testing (recently refreshed their site) — http://web.archive.org/web/20190201001118/https://www.usertesting.com/
(Edit: formatting)
barrowclift··on NetNewsWire 5.0: Open-Source RSS Reader for Mac
Based on the praise others have been giving this, I can't help but feel I'm reviewing a completely different app.

To me, supporting only Feedbin is a showstopper and woefully insufficient considering its contemporaries all support half a dozen or more RSS aggregators out of the box. I'm not about to completely switch providers just to try out a different RSS reader.

I also find it strange any development effort at all went into "On My Mac" as an option. Local-only RSS is functionally useless to me since at any given time I'm reading either on two different Macs, an iPad, or an iPhone. No RSS reader is an island!

I get it, it's open source and free, and I suppose if you value that over a product's functionality and usefulness, then NetNewsWire's the RSS reader for you. But for me, this is simply not good enough.

barrowclift··on Ask HN: Show your own blog/vlog
Here's mine: https://barrowclift.me

Hosted with Github Pages and Jekyll.

barrowclift··on Ask HN: More tech-oriented HN alternative?
Yes and no; if it was a browser extension that would limit the functionality to browsers that support extensions, and half of my browsing is done on Safari on iOS. This is the only option that covers my browsing in all cases.
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