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I love drag-and-dropping to arbitrary locations in the Finder using spring-loaded folders. I think it is a bit tricky…if you don’t know the trick.

Yeah I don’t actually want Apple to put Alps switches into a Macbook.

I’d buy one if they did though.

Yeah, Windows has gotten better in recent years with “Precision Touchpad” support. If you use an Apple Magic Trackpad on Windows (not supported but works on normal PCs, not just Boot Camp) Windows recognizes it as a Precision Touchpad.

Scrolling that exactly matches your fingers and has “realistic” momentum.

On a Mac I might scroll through an article by just sort of pushing it the right direction, removing my hand from the trackpad and then tapping to stop it at the right place. It’s very hard to describe these things because so much is muscle memory.

I can’t right click on them. I guess you have to raise up your fingers from the left side? I just found that to be a dealbreaker. I’ve had to use them for work and I turn them into one-button mice with scrolling. The scrolling is excellent, I like low-profile mice, and I don’t mind the charger port location. But I need to right click!

That “ROI” comment stood out. Companies should focus on making quality products without tying everything to ROI. The state of some software on Linux is just embarrassing. No attention to detail. Oh and I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware via floppy disks.

I have an external Apple touchpad and I got the Boot Camp drivers for it working on my gaming PC. I keep it to the left of my keyboard with my mouse on my right to alternate hands for RSI reasons and because even Windows has a lot of features that work best via trackpad gestures.

Apple has been perfecting its trackpad software since 1994, and it’s been getting better ever since. By contrast Apple keyboards have gotten worse since 1995 when it discontinued the Apple Extended Keyboard II. We don’t talk about Apple’s mice.

I think the basic file system exposed to users in the Finder is pretty simple. /Applications, app bundles, etc.

The Unix under the hood is just standard stuff and Apples hides away detritus like .plist files. And sandboxed apps have their own little stub filesystems too.

Anyway I like the idea of GoboLinux a lot but kind of think GUIX, just abstracting it away might be the right approach.

That was FaceTime, and it was because it was a peer-to-peer protocol. Then Apple was sued over a patent and had to implement a more normal design, where it pays for and runs the servers. Apple didn't want to run the servers for Android people to talk to each other.

Encrypted RCS should be a standard. When it is Google should adopt the standard, not its proprietary version. In the meantime I want Apple to implement standards, not proprietary Google technologies.

the anthropic principle is why we find ourselves in such an unlikely place (a habitable planet) instead of somewhere that can’t support life. it’s not an argument for god.

it’s not entirely trivial. if someone says “god did it” because we find ourselves on earth not mars the anthropic principle is a better explanation.

Amazing that you can just pop up an emulator in a browser window. Retro Mac emulation used to be such a pain in the ass.

At least apps instead of the web browser can handle the copy/paste a username thing.

But, I stopped using Mastodon because there is no algorithmic feed (either of my own follows or in terms of surfacing things)—-sorry I massively prefer something lightly curated to just a chronological firehose. Most-recent-first is an algorithm of course. One that’s biased in favor of constant posters and those in your own time zone.

China has fined companies for referring to Taiwan as a "country" on websites in English, directed towards Americans, for instance.

Apart from financial crimes the US imposes US law on foreign companies all the time--e.g. companies that do business with embargoed countries.

Also the US considers things like "a transaction was conducted in dollars" as a hook for US jurisdiction.

People who think (for ideological reasons) that the web should be the world's primary software platform don't like Safari.

Personally I hate web apps, so I am fine with Safari.

Adobe / Figma, and Amazon / iRobot.

And to the point of the discussion, there are no "limits" to what jurisdiction governments have. Governments--the United States especially but many others--does it all the time, especially as concerns financial matters. Many countries have declared that they have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity committed any time, anywhere, by anyone. China has penalized American companies for activities involving Americans in America.

However the EU probably has self-imposed limits (or imposed by the member states) and as a practical matter only large or powerful states can get away with it.

The Book Palma is great. I had been vaguely dissatisfied with other Boox devices--and it turns out, it was because they didn't have enough RAM and were too slow. The Palma is responsive enough to actually use for other things than reading. But, reading is the primary use case.

Simplicity? A guarantee that the file will be readable in 20 years? Project Gutenberg still treats plain text as the default format for a reason.

this is an issue in the legal world. court opinions accessed only online are cited according to their “page number” in some reporter or another. it’s better to cite paragraph numbers when possible but most American legal documents are un-numbered.

Thank you. It’s really frustrating that people want to make documents as unreliable and annoying as the web.

I understand all this but there needs to be a simple format for just regular books without all this complication. I thought that’s what ePubs were for. What I want it basically an ebook format that is mostly zip files of plain text.

Yeah, MS Office PDF generation (at least some time ago) did not generate PDFs with embedded fonts, and I’d often come across weird-looking documents where the system is using a font with the wrong characteristics. Print-to-PDF usually avoids this.

people don’t want fixed layout documents only for printing. they want them because they want to fix the layout of their documents more than they care about small screens.

My view as a heavy ebook reader: ePubs should be inert data. No javascript, no interactivity, no network resources. Just a fancy text file with some appearance settings all of which the reader can override.

Linux developers didn’t need Apple to do anything to support Linux. Drivers are nice for trackpad, etc though.

I don’t agree with the idea that web apps should supplant native software. I’d rather the web were mostly just hyperlinked text. Going to a web page should not download and run software on my computer.

Zero-knowledge methods for verifying age are possible but there is almost no political will or interest in them. Sites would get a “yes” or “no” as to whether someone is of age, and no other information.

I love this service. Happy customer!

I manage files on my iPad (and iPhone) with Files and iCloud Drive. It’s been around for a while! The problem is that many apps are still stuck in 2015. But for apps that support it, using the Files file picker is no different than using the Mac file picker and Finder. You open files, you save them, they sync. Some apps do default to their own folder in iCloud Drive, but that folder can be accessed by any other app and is also available on the desktop.

Sadly third-party support for Files plugins is not what it should be (Google Drive is so incomplete I don’t know why they even bother). The major cloud services want you using their apps, I guess.

But Secure Shellfish does it perfectly so my Windows media server is available as a “file system” on my iPhone and iPad via SFTP.

I use a combo of desktop computers with giant screens and an iPad. I like this better than having a laptop. I don’t think the traditional multi-window paradigm works well on a very small screen (though I am aware it was invented for tiny screens!). When I’m mobile I prefer to have just one app at a time, or at most Stage Manager.

The biggest problems I run into with iPadOS are not related to the OS, but stripped-down apps, or apps that don’t use the file picker and other iPad features. In a few cases I have to use web apps (which work perfectly) instead of iPad apps, for example with Google Docs, since the iPad apps are more like stripped-down phone apps.