easeout

That obstacle and the Swift language are unrelated. The same applies to a Rust app or Electron or anything.

I don't know about that example—when ARC was added to Objective-C back in the day, I don't remember clang feeling any slower as a result.

Foundation wasn't made to be part of the Swift project until recently. 25 years ago it was the "foundation" of Cocoa, the Mac OS X API derived from NEXTSTEP. It was an Apple platform thing explicitly—now it is remade in Swift and is part of the Swift project.

That's a good point. I had in mind that there's some regret about the combination of type inference with type-based overloads, due to the search expense it adds to what ought to be straightforward parsing of long expressions.

This, right?

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-foundation

The idea is to end up with one fewer!

Have a look at today's Swift track FOSDEM talks.

For what it's worth, they ship a solid VS Code extension and LSP. Their swift-testing package is the new open source and cross-platform successor to XCTest. The same can be said of swift-foundation as compared to Foundation.

The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations.

Personally I think the main problem with the language, besides Apple's earned poor reputation in FOSS circles, is the compile times. In the source-stable era of the language I'm not sure how they can really be fixed to the degree I'd be happy with.

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare minimum"?

Y'all has been here to stay in the mainstream for a good long while. It really needs no defending. Bless your heart

So then, they can claim something is AGI when it isn't, just for the hype benefits, because there's no downside to saying so.

Funny, I thought it continued a while and died with social media.

OK, shake to undo is obscure as hell. But Apple is historically the example of app consistency with platform norms and feature discoverability through progressive disclosure. The HIG are not always followed, certainly not as often today as before, but they are the model everyone else emulates poorly.

My real point was that I want them to have competition so I can have options I like.

I'm glad this aspect of Android world exists, similar to the way I'm glad Linux on the desktop exists. I love how the FOSS community focuses on user ownership. But I also want them to focus hard on non-hobbyist user experience. I think it could make their output competitive with corporations. Anyway, I hope this comes off as constructive.

Last time I tried nixos-gnome and mouse-scrolled a window in the settings app, it got caught on a slider, started adjusting the slider instead, and I couldn't tell what the original value was, and when I searched about it, there's no setting to not adjust sliders with mouse scrolling. Don't get me started about copy and paste being different keystrokes in a terminal. Windows has the same problem and many more.

Well, phones don't have those exact problems, but you get the idea. It's little papercuts everywhere, sometimes caused by settings that could fix them but have the wrong defaults.

You're right. Now why won't anyone else make computers or phones that I like and want to use due to their nice, consistent user interfaces and stability? Apple's quality has slid in both of these regards, and what really sucks is that no one else comes close anyway.

If you have the offload feature turned on, downloading a new app or an OS update can cause least recently used apps to have their app bundle deleted while their Home Screen icons remain, such that they'll be downloaded again when you next launch them. I think the app sandbox files are kept on the phone, so you're still logged in. It's a way to cope with not having a big enough flash disk. OS updates are bigger than apps so the feature unblocks some users from upgrading.

To your last question: Contacts don't take much space, so probably never.

Photos and videos, if you use iCloud sync, you can choose to hold lower or original quality on your device but either way iCloud is the authoritative storage point. I don't think they get offloaded like apps when you need more space but they're big enough for that to be realistic. Conversely I think when your local storage is full, new photos taken elsewhere won't sync down.

How does binning work when your chip is the entire wafer?

So slapdash Unity asset store video games were right all along!

The final spaghetti point really takes the wind out of this article's sails. A lot of it is good information, but too many parts make me think "That's a stretch."

I haven't, but you can compare editions with this SICP Comparison Edition:

https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/

I'm happy to use LLM products for what they can do right now, while they're still cheap. Even though they're maintained by high investment that may never pay off, enshittification has not yet set in.

Swift has a lot of features, but you can leave many of them alone to begin with and learn them when you need them. Low-syntax defaults work in a reasonable, streamlined way. SwiftUI will confront you with more syntactic variations than other Swift code, but that's not unusual in a DSL. Overall it's a smooth learning curve due to progressive disclosure in language features.

If Swift compiled five times faster, I would want for very little. But I don't know how they'd walk back the combination of type-based overloading and implicit conversions. See: https://belkadan.com/blog/2021/08/Swift-Regret-Type-based-Ov...

Come to think of it, execute-and-inhibit style as described here is exactly what's going on when in continuous deployment you run your same pipeline many times a day with small changes, and gate new development behind feature flags. We're familiar with the confidence derived from frequently repeating the whole job.

Inheriting Dune's gameplay required inventing another valuable substance in a new setting. They didn't come right out and say he who controls the tiberium controls the universe, but…

You say that, but there are tons of features in Notes. They're just successfully kept out of your way until you go looking for them, so when you just want a note that's what you get. This is progressive disclosure, a longtime tenet of Apple GUI design.

A relevant and somewhat meta example: This year they added disclosable sections, which were previously a differentiator for Notion. That's in addition to handwriting selection and editing, voice memos, collaborative editing… Not to mention it's still a regular app and you can have as many note windows as you want.

Back then, my download site of choice was happy puppy.

Thanks for your work!

While I agree in principle, this is a professor sharing as foolproof a method as he can find to get many students, whose existing knowledge, setup, and CLI avoidance he can't control, to the meat of the course experience he has designed for them.

It's gross that this has a person's first name. How dehumanizing that will be for real Devins as this kind of thing becomes productized. How tempting to compare yourself to a "teammate" your employer pays a cloud tenant subscription for.

Cool game, grandma