marbletiles

Easy is hard. That is, to make something easy for users, you have to work hard to build great tools for them. Helix appears to be punting on that.

Examples:

> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents.

Markdown is a lossy format. Sometimes that's good (it'll strip unwanted Word formatting), but there are vital things that get lost too. (The easiest to grasp are the internationalisation issues, like mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts in the same paragraph, or multiple language spans.)

> To add metadata to your page, create a table like this at the end of the document

And how is this better than an actual tool, with actual field validation, helpful UX, etc? It's not: it's undiscoverable magic boxes with inexplicable (to the user) side-effects that oblige users to remember secret incantations (or sticky them to their screens) and hope everything works out all right.

This is the opposite of "intuitive and fast". Which anybody familiar with AEM won't be surprised by.

> turned on by that marvellous column in Quantum

which column?

PowerPoint has been iterated over the years to be more or less a document publishing app that happens to go full-screen. It has support for lots of embeddings (like Excel), and can help turn especially heavy chunks of text into something slightly more digestible – Smart Art is good at this, in fact.

Conversely, Keynote was and remains an app designed for visually heavy presentations, so it optimises a lot more for aesthetics: gradients, blends, transparency, (sadly still no blur wtf), animation of items on a slide, very complex animated reveal and build, complicated slide transitions, etc. It has also UX optimised for visually precise layout (in areas PowerPoint is frankly unhelpful).

If you just want to make people look at pages after page of charts and graphs that should have been memos, PowerPoint is good and possibly stronger. If you want to make an aesthetically compelling visual presentation, Keynote will get you there for less effort.

The principle of charity is to make the strongest possible version you can imagine of the opposing argument, and I also struggle with constructing yours. It appears to be “no electric car buyer with $140k to spend could ever rationally choose anything other than a Tesla”.

If that’s your position, as a Tesla owner who has invested an awful lot of effort across this post in battling Someones Wrong On The Internet, I’m going to say there’s emotion at play, yes.

If it’s merely “a Mercedes isn’t a slam dunk choice, Tesla still has something to offer”, well yes, that is true.

Regardless, and after reflecting on everything you said, I do now think Tesla is quite like Apple here. Just as with the first few years of the iPhone, they created the market and had it essentially to themselves. They offer a limited set of choices and highly opinionated take-it-or-leave design with fixed high prices.

Now the other manufacturers are arriving, just as the array of Androids did, with a variety of models, price points and customisability.

Now will follow years of mutual incomprehensibility and internet arguing over why one set of trade-offs are objectively better than another.

“Lying” is a bit emotive, suggests you might be a bit too invested here to get the argument the GP was making.

Look, Tesla got early success in EVs by being considerably better where everyone else was weak (drivetrain, battery, software, charging network). That doesn’t mean it’s not weak where they are strong (QC, basic manfacturing competencies like panel gaps, dealer network, interaction switchgear refined over generations).

Yes, Tesla have also been innovative in attempting to turn those “bugs” into features - better online ordering, rapid response to QC fails, replacing complex switchgear with an tablet and a modally overloaded pair of dials).

Regardless, what matters is there are people who feel about Mercedes the way you clearly feel about Tesla. Emotion has always mattered with cars; you don’t win those people over with talk of cubic feet.

GP is betting there’s a huge market for “car like I always knew it from a manufacturer I love except with a battery” and I’ll bet they’re right.

“Range” is likely the only one of those metrics Jane will care about. This sounds like one of those rants we used to hear about “why would anyone buy a Mac when PCs have higher specs??”

Mercedes does cabin UX like Apple does software (and BMW is better still). Maybe Jane wants a button for her wing mirrors. And door handles that work. Actually comfortable suspension. An instrument cluster. A dealer to look after her from decision to delivery.

I adore this but wish it could catch cmd-W because i'm closing the entire browser window far too much and can't untrain my fingers

Message interop is the bit that leaps out at me. How can that work? (Because I’d really like it to)

This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess.

Just use Seamonkey if you want it to look like Netscape, surely.

> I suspect not likely to return.

Phone pics have so quickly become the “default” look that full-frame wide-aperture shots are now becoming almost an affectation; one that can cause comment in itself - like choosing Polaroids or b&w film used to be.

I wonder how that will play out. Filmmaking opted to go back to “blurry” 24fps even when higher rates were available, but the convenience of phones generally always wins.

No app at all. Because that leaves a gap in the market for a native alternative.

That means a potential reward for the patient/smart/etc developer who knows native code, which means a better class of developer, which in turn means better software.

And it means more native apps for the platforms, which means a better class of app.

In short, everything is not better when Electron is everywhere. It actively damages the ecosystems of the platforms that host it.

This is quite tricky to do, because it’s almost a sleight of hand and expressing it in English is like watching the trick from behind the magician - you can obviously see the wrongness.

But: if you skip a pair of horses (which is how the trick is done/the error introduced) it might be:

Assume any group of 3 horses are the same colour. Can we show that adding another horse will result in a group of horses that are all the same colour?

Well yes: take your new group of 4 horses, and extract 1. (h1). Three horses remain and they must by definition be the same colour. Put h1 back and extract a different horse (h2). Now three remain and must by definition be the same colour as each other.

But when h2 was out, h1 was part of a group that was all the same colour. And when h1 was out, h2 was part of a group that was all the same colour. Therefore they must all be the same colour. It doesn’t matter how many different horses you find and bring to your initial group of 3, the rules will mean the resulting group of 4 is always the same colour. And so it is true for a group of 4 horses.

By the same reasoning, it must then be true for a group of 5, and so on up to all horses.

So all horses are the same colour, so long as the first assumption (that any group of 3 horses must be the same colour) holds.

The trick/error is jumping from “a group of 1 horses must all be the same colour” to “a group of 3 horses must be the same colour” which is an easy jump to miss if you go from “1” to “n”, instead of “1” to “3”.

(The logic doesn’t work for a pair of horses, because once h1 is taken out there are no other horses left that h2 must be the same colour as.)

Those doors are often on corridors. You don’t want them unexpectedly opening at speed into passing non-bathroom traffic. Conversely, people approaching the door from the inside will be further away as they have their hand out in readiness to pull, will expect the door to open — it’s generally lower risk.

Is InterMedia available anywhere? It looks fascinating, but isn't in any of the usual retro-software places.

1. Right, but unless you want a circular argument, the “better” you are missing is the ability to separate the two. You should be able to type a note featuring all the characters on the keyboard without unexpected side-effects, this doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.

2. And yet the inventor of the thing repeatedly gets it wrong.

3. Visual editing here meaning more WYSIWYG than the inclusion of images, but it raises a good point - the bounds of what we consider a document is rapidly outstripping what markdown can comfortably capture. Tools like Notion are blurring the line between what used to be thought of as “text” and “embed” and are making great user experiences by doing so.

4. Honestly, in this context (document editing) I think of ClarisWorks as a more powerful tool than any Markdown editor I’ve ever seen.

A ClarisWorks with Obsidian-like features would be a rocket ship for the mind. Limiting Obsidian to Markdown is like using diesel to fuel the rocket.

Why not try FrameMaker or something actually built for the job, instead of forcing your poor team into a “still-actually-techie” format written to get around the limitations of MovableType for formatting weblogs? You’ll get DocBook support and still be free of the undeniable horror that is Word

Markdown mixes formatting and content (in a lossy way - did the author mean that asterisk as a format character or as part of their text? Who knows). It doesn’t support spans or ranges for mixing languages. It has hard-to-remember syntax, especially around links - Gruber makes mistakes with it all the time. And it doesn’t easily support the sort of powerful visual editing tools like you might have seen on a 1980s Mac. And worst of all, developers think it’s “good enough” and ship it to non-developer users instead of making them actually powerful tools for managing text.

(Again, rich text doesn’t need a binary file format but you ignored that)

Word’s Track Changes literally does this - you can compare/merge/etc. Quark also had extensions in the 90s that allowed it. It’s entirely feasible for any binary format (assuming you understand the format); why wouldn’t it be?

And it makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint, eg for lawyers, which is why they implemented it. Is it as rich as git? No, the use-case is different. Could it be? Yes.

I’m going to leave “power and freedom” where they lie and go marvel at the awesome power of the “Italic” and “Table” buttons from Word 5.1.

You are begging the question. Git works well with plaintext because it is a product of the 1970s thinking that OP is bemoaning. If we built tools to do Git-like things on rich text file formats, they’d work just as well. (And Track Changes does a subset of those things surprisingly well inside Word, fwiw)

And OP didn’t specify binary output. The output format could be anything we standardised on, just so long as it supports rich editing environments. That is, we shouldn’t have to write in the output format; the two can (and probably should) be disconnected.

Markdown is both a terrible output format and editing experience, especially when you get complicated. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Apple Photos is no Aperture, but the lack of an alternative listed for Linux is glaring. What’s he managing all these RAWs he’s shooting with?

This falls uneasily between two stools for me. For a photography-focused space, it doesn't have anything like the wealth of photography tools and data that Flickr does (or even just EXIF). For a community space, it doesn't have bookmarking or nudging or sufficient interaction beyond comments to make that work for me either.

Both those things can be secondary if it's exposing you to great new work and new trends in photography, but the onboarding didn't bode well on that front: of all the photographers it suggested I follow there was one woman and one non-white person in the mix. That's not a slam dunk on their work but it did turn out (from what I can see) to all be in a very similar sort of "late-millennial white man with a mirrorless" niche.

> decentralizing the distribution of quality news

This is laudable - but it ignores the reality of aggregators and user behaviour in the attention economy. The audience is centralised, and increasingly so. The question becomes: how can a pluralistic public-service ecosystem flourish within that economy?

In the UK the BBC has tried a number of routes for this, including sponsoring local reporters, external linking to local news outlets to try and share their audience and so on. None have really been successful but it's important that they keep trying -- and odd that a piece like this wouldn't mention the BBC at all, come to think of it.

you can make it look like TextWrangler too if that helps

Which makes it all the more impressive that it's quoting Tacitus and such like. There's an important distinction between reading level and intelligence, and I think we conflate the two in modern writing. Simple language doesn't need to be simplistic.

Have they made any sort of statement?

The revamped Sleeper is great, albeit pricey, especially now they've sorted the early issues with the new trains and crews.

It's also ideal for getting a full day of work in either London/Glasgow and returning. Doing that by plane is also possible but is environmentally horrible and taxing, doing it by train eats into good chunks of the days either side.

Very worth looking at this in the context of https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-unauthorized-story-of-andreess... (Summary: AH doesn't like how the media has become critical of tech, would like to present its own narratives by going direct)

Getting a clear picture of your recipient's understanding is much harder when you have to back-and-forth async. In discussion it's considerably easier to see when a point hasn't landed, ask questions to check for understanding, and dive more deeply into the areas of confusion. It can be a real time-saver.

The author has deleted their Twitters and Discord too, and the domain has gone. Seems very scorched earth, I hope they're OK. (Not least because I love to see new publishing platforms and wish them all the best)