mightykan

An alternative to Zulip is Twist - https://twistapp.com. (I'm not affiliated with them at all; just a fan.)

They have a proper native (as in not Electron-based) Mac OS X app (probably other platforms, too, but I haven't checked), which launches almost instantly and consumes a very reasonable amount of RAM. It's definitely worth a look.

And a toy light bar whose brightness and duration cannot be controlled (which sucks precious battery life) and is an insult to the "Pro" name. Are there any serious options available?

I see you have nearly 30 different third-party frameworks in your iOS app, some of which are purely for user-tracking and analytics purposes. Furthermore, it looks like you’re using AWS (AWS Rekognition) and Azure (Microsoft Face API) AI/Image/Face recognition services. Although your Privacy Policy mostly covers what you’re doing, a more prominent permission request screen and more explicit warnings about this is warranted. Your iOS app is basically just a shell really. All of its functionality is provided by cloud services. Although this is the norm nowadays, I think the burden of informing the users falls primarily on you, the developer, especially considering the main subject of your app is infants and children. All of this is further alarming since your app isn’t free so even the Facebook excuse of “it’s free!” doesn’t really apply here.

Atlassian have become (probably always were) a horrible, customer-hostile company. This is terrible.

Honestly, they’ve been pulling the same crap on the Mac version, too. It’s like they purposely went about crippling their own app and making it worse in every way. Every version that comes out is uglier and has less functionality than before. And of course Atlassian could care less. They completely stopped responding on Twitter and started deleting all negative comments on their SourceTree blog. I have an older version for Mac OS X that I use, which I could never upgrade because all the newer versions are demonstrably worse. I hope it continues to work because there are no other native and non-hybrid/electron GUI clients let. (Tower has less than 50% of SourceTree’s features and the developers seem focused on creating a Windows version instead of adding the missing features to the already existing Mac version).

I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah for 11 years. Needless to say, I got out five years ago the first chance I got. If you’re not into winter sports, the weather is shit. You get 10 months of bitter cold and snow every day. You have to dig your car out of the snow all winter and drive on horrible conditions with clueless drivers who seem to forget how to drive in snow every year. Spring and fall are one or so week each and you get rain storms the whole time. Then you have 6 or so weeks of scorching hot summer where it’s unbearable to be outside.

I never ventured outside of the metro area and no one was ever overtly racist but boy if you are not a white Mormon you will stick out, you will be judged and questioned. Most Utah Mormons are conditioned to be nice so on the surface they appear so but they do judge and single out people who don’t belong.

I visited SF over a weekend and was instantly surprised about how accepting everyone was. It just seemed like I fit in and belonged. I’d tolerate much worse conditions than “low income in SF” than be “rich” in Utah.

Getting device serial numbers through private APIs and transferring this information to their servers isn’t “extremely minor.” Any other lesser-known developer would’ve been rejected if not outright banned. Apple has something to answer here. Why is Uber still allowed in? How many offenses are companies allowed?

Objective-C isn’t deprecated at all. There is more chance of current valid Swift code being deprecated in a year than Objective-C. In fact, all Swift code written in its first two years of public existence is completely deprecated now. The same code, had it been written in Objective-C would be perfectly valid today.

Somewhat related:

In 2010 I implemented a UIView subclass for a simple stylized spinner. In the view controller that contained this spinner, I added two methods to start and stop the spinner. I called them `startSpinner` and `stopSpinner`. Our app was rejected for using “private APIs.” Finding it ridiculous that Apple would use such a common signature internally without any prefixes and actually would check for it in all third-party apps and reject them, we relented and changed our method names.

In 2015, at a new job, in a new city and working on an entirely different project, I had to implement another UI spinner. Since I’m a creature of habit, I again named the methods for starting and stopping the spinner: `startSpinner` and `stopSpinner` respectively. This time the project I was working on was an SDK so all of our clients were being rejected for using a private API, named... “startSpinner” and “stopSpinner”.

Software is hard.

... for now. Once the news cycle ends, Comcast will be one of the first companies to sell this information and make tons of money. Verizon is already there[1].

[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/31/eff-verizon-will-install...

I have zero power now but have the potential to have it. If I don't know how to behave like a decent human around my female coworkers and peers right now, I would have no idea how to do this when I have more power (e.g. become a manager). But, then, I'd have the power to cause irreparable emotional and societal damage. If I don't know how to act like a rational reasonable human being who respects others no matter their background or gender, this won't change. All that will change is that I have the authority to cause great damage.

I don't know much and I certainly don't claim to know much. All I know is that if we (men) don't curb our own behavior, we're the one squarely at fault.

I'm so tired of this "not all men" attitude. As someone who gets paid to make fact-based decisions all day, I cannot possibly ignore this ridiculous argument that women are at fault. No, way. Yes, anything is possible but the scenario you're proposing is so rare that is an anomaly. Get off that horse, dude. Stop being on the wrong side of history.

I honestly wonder how people here would react if a blog posts like this came out about a company that hasn’t necessarily been in the news for this many past bad behavior. Would we still condemn that company or would we blame the victim, as is the case usually?

We should teach our sons to truly respect women. We should teach our sons to be respectful honest decent human beings. We should teach our sons to not be assholes who think they are entitled to a woman’s body. We should teach our sons to be humans with emotions and empathy for others. We should teach our sons to not be toxic despicable entitled pathetic beings. It’s on us (men). If we behave badly, it’s squarely on us. No external factor (law, regulation, social status, etc) would have any effect if we don’t know how (or don’t want) to be good.

“Fake news” is an oxymoron. I think you mean “propaganda.”

This is unfortunate as I thought an iOS 10-only update was supposed to fix this. Goes to show that the Pinner developer doesn’t care about providing any support.

Sorry, I don’t. ReadKit on OS X is decent (and is the only native Mac app that I could find that actually integrates the Pinboard API) but I don’t know of anything else on other platforms.

I’ll have to start looking for this, soon, however. I’m seriously considering switching. Another service that seems to have no native clients on Windows or Linux is Feedbin.

It used to be that one could find tons of native apps for Windows for pretty much anything. Now there’re hardly any for popular services. I’m not sure if this is because of Microsoft’s seemingly schizophrenia approach to their office APIs (is it MFC? Win32? WinForms? XAML? UWP? Something else?) and their lack of focus or just the iPhone and mobile computing’s “halo” effect.

Unfortunately there are no good iOS apps for it. The only decent one, Pinner, decided, inexplicably, to drop iOS 9 support as soon as iOS 10 was released. iOS 9 is still fully supported by Apple. (Using iOS 10 isn’t an option for me for now). The iOS 9 version’s share extension still has a few bugs that completely block the third-party apps’ UI when adding URLs. Also the Pinner developer never responds to any support requests. I’ve tried sending him emails and hit him up on Twitter. He is completely silent.

All the other iOS apps I’ve tried are laughably crippled. One of the apps I tried (Pinswift) still opens all links in an embedded web view, which means I couldn’t easily log into any sites because I’d have to copy and paste the credentials and OTP manually (NYTimes, WaPost, GitHub, etc). This also means no ad blocking or other protections and functionality offered by the SafariViewController feature in iOS.

I’d also expect for $9.99 plus a $1.99 for “Premium Fonts” Pushpin for Pinboard to be excellent but it isn’t. It’s unstable and its share extension isn’t as flexible as Pinner’s.

That said, Pinboard is a good service. It cares about my privacy, which is very important to me, and has the features I need for a bookmarking service. It is not a read-later service. For example, the article caching features that it provides is web-only and isn’t available through the API so no third-party app can integrate it. This means there is no truly offline reading experience since I’d have to have access to the Pinboard website if I want to read a cached link.

This is absolutely not a solution if you have tinnitus or a hearing damage or both.

Also this is an insane workaround. Think about what you’re suggesting: the environment that you’re working in, the place where you go to, intentionally, to focus and concentrate, is so filled with undesired and irrelevant noise, that in order to get your work done, you need to tune it out with headphones. How does that make sense?

These companies are constantly in search of the smartest people and yet they think they can get away with such obviously illogical lines. They have people who are best at identifying and fixing corner cases in very complex systems and yet they want these employees to ignore this completely illogical line of thinking? This is insulting and annoying.

I believe they’re located in Mountain View. The only way I was able to find this was to look at their Terms of Service, however, so it might not be accurate.

Yes, this is exactly why headphones are not an option. No headphone I’ve ever tried is completely able to block outside noise. Some do a decent job but then my tinnitus kicks in and is maddening.

They’ve been fixing this issue with every release of Xcode and it’s still broken. At some point we must realize that code-signing is something that the Xcode team will never be able to get working reliably due to incompetence or apathy (or both).

Even that is not true any more. A few recent examples:

- iPhone 6s/6s+ are heavier & thicker than iPhone 6. They have worse, especially low-light, cameras compared to iPhone 6 and have smaller, therefore worse, batteries. All of this for a gimmicky, screen that pops up a contextual menu that is covered by your finger that brought it up.

- A computer with a single port for everything, even charging, i.e. MacBook.

- Apple TV 4th gen. remote and usability.

- Charging situation with Magic Mouse 2.

- Charging situation with Apple Pencil.

- Removal of the perfectly usable headphone jack on iPhone 7.

- iPhone 7 has stereo speakers in landscape orientation but the Music apps in iOS is portrait only.

And don't get me started on their software.

Seems to be a hardware restriction. According to the PS4 Pro: The Ultimate FAQ[1]:

"No, PS4 Pro’s internal Blu-ray drive does not support the new Ultra 4K Blu-ray Disc format."

So, no future firmware update can fix this.

[1]: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/09/08/ps4-pro-the-ultima...

They included that adapter this year but is it going to be there next year? Is the next phone going to have the Lightning wired headphone, too? Apple's like the empire. They _will_ be altering the deal.

So what's the point of getting one of these instead of the Xbone S, which _does_ have UHD Blu-ray support?

Are you associated with the Mercedes (Daimler AG)-owned sub-brand, Smart car (http://www.smart.com/ && http://www.smartusa.com)?

If not, are you aware that they exist and if so, how do you think Daimler will react when you get some traction? A lawsuit over the name is certainly bound to be filed by Daimler, don't you think? Do you have any plans to change the name of the company?

Asking for email, and sometimes name, is fine. Forcing me to register is absurd. There are lots of “indy” software developers that don’t play these games.

Why do I need to create an account with an email and password to purchase this if it’s not a subscription service? To add insult to injury, I have to agree to some Terms of Service that probably indemnifies this company from doing whatever they want with my data. Who comes up with these brilliant ideas?

The Mac App Store is absolutely horrible (lots of bugs, slow, inconsistent, almost unusable, absurd certificate expiration issues that are completely embarrassing for a company like Apple, etc.) and Apple has completely ignored all developers who use it... but this is exactly why I always prefer buying from it. I don’t want some nobody developer harvesting my information, and selling/renting it off to some who knows who either now or some years down the line when the company folds.

Please have respect for your potential paying customers and drop these kinds of practices. Other than recovering a potentially lost license key, there is absolutely nothing I need from you, including any and all “news or updates”, after I have purchased the app. Therefore you should only really need some unique value (like the hash of an email address) for that.

Actually, everything is DRM encumbered on iTunes except music that is purchased. All other content has Fairplay DRM on it.

iPod touch is thinner than an iPhone and still has a 3.5mm jack. Thickness considerations isn’t a reason to remove it. The thickness of iPhone 6S/Plus actually increased compared to 6/Plus to accommodate the, to me, gimmicky 3D touch display assembly. The size of the battery shrank, too. So, if Apple really cared about thinness and battery life, they wouldn’t have included/will remove the 3D touch stuff in the next iPhone. I think controlling all aspects of the device (perhaps a DRM move?) is one reason but I have yet to hear a compelling reason to remove.

I suspect that if they were to remove it, they’ll do it without trying to justify it at all. They’ll present it as the way it is. See the App Store search results Ad. announcement, which is borderline tone-deaf, for one recent example of doing something that wholly benefits Apple and no one else.