> Does it even say what the product or service is?
Do you really need spoon-feeding that directly?
The whole site is about the product. Much more information about it is literally a click-or-two away. Describing it specifically on that page, given how much information is already around it on directly linked pages, would seem superfluously wordy (even to me, someone who just used “superfluously” instead of “overly”).
> Or is it self-congratulatory spam?
Largely, yes. But no more than so people having anniversary parties are showing off, do you begrudge that sort of thing too?
I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating “I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that” (yes, as some may be wondering, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge the strong touch of hypocrisy in that comment!).
"Spoon-feeding?" Saying WTF the product is isn't spoon-feeding. Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain) because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words is douchey as hell, and way too often accepted (and even actively promoted) here.
"I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating 'I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that'"
I don't see anyone saying that. What I said was, why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
> Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain)
One. Single. Click.
Two if you go via one of the menus not clicking the main logo.
> because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words
As far as the writer is concerned, if you are looking at the blog you are already interested and know what you are looking at. Is it their fault that someone deep-ish linked without providing extra context for you?
> why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
You could have just moved on and read something else, accepting that not everything is written for everyone, and not wasted more time moaning about it…
Why are you being such a stick-in-the-mud? It's an interesting and inspiration post on HN about a successfull bootstrapped indie startup. HN is primarily a startup & tech-driven community, so obviously we're all interested in stories like this. In fact, I miss the days where HN was almost solely startup post-mortems or success stories. How is the post even remotely self-congratulatory spam?
Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?
I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.
I would recommend trying sunvox if you want to dip into trackers. It is free on desktop and cheap on mobile and runs on most platforms. In fact, I have a 2012 iPad that runs it fine.
Trackers are just a different way of entering midi data and automation, literally typing in the values you want. They offer an unreal level of granular control, but at the expense of being able to visualize your melodies on a horizontal timeline.
Modern trackers are basically complete DAWs and sunvox is no exception. It contains a modular synthesis system that is amazing for sound design and creating your own reusable instruments and effect modules. I find myself writing less repetitive parts with a tracker, closer to what I would write if I was composing with staff paper.
I have a smaller tracker app that has similar problems on mac.
When you use the keyboard for navigation , holding down a key brings up the accent dialog thing. It also starts doing that “bllllllllllpppppp” noise like you’re doing something wrong.
If you try to add sandbox and harding the SDL timer seems to go nuts, loops too fast and crashes often.
Also, a lot of old tracker code uses 32 bit tricks that arm64 just doesn’t like and there doesn’t seem to be a nice way to force a 32 bit mode.
If you dont build with sandbox or harding it behaves better, but then of course you can’t validate or distribute it.
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?
This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.
And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.
So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.
It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window.
The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
We don't do desktop computing like we did then. Most of what was separate applications then are now done in-browser: it's like running a virtual machine inside your OS.
I don't need to know that what I'm using is Edge/Chrome/Firefox any more than I need to know that what I'm using is Windows/etc.
Amen. And then there's the idiotic peek-a-boo UI that hides controls until you accidentally roll over them with the cursor... not saving any space at all.
This isn't just a Windows thing. Look at Gnome for another example. macOS of late also likes to take over the title bar for random reasons, although there at least the menu bar is still present regardless.
At least on Linux (depending on wm) I have Alt/Gui + Drag to move around from anywhere in the window. (And installed a program that does the same for Windows)
I've always considered the Mac's shared menu bar a GUI 1.0 mistake that should have been fixed in the transition to OS X. Forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen, and doesn't switch back to the previous application when you minimize the one you're working with, is dumb.
Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.
But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.
...The Mac menu bar is what it is for a very good reason. Being at the top of the screen makes it an infinitely-tall target.
All you have to do to get to it is move your mouse up until you can't move it up any more.
This remains a very valuable aspect to it no matter what changes in the vogue of UIs have come and gone since.
The fact that you think that you've "minimized the application" when you minimized a window just shows that you are operating on a different (not better, not worse, just different) philosophy of how applications work than the macOS designers are.
This argument never made much sense to me, although I do subscribe to Fitts' Law. With desktop monitor sizes since 20+ years ago, the distance you have to travel, together with the visual disconnect between application and the menu bar, negates the easier targetability. And with smaller screen sizes, you would generally maximize the application window anyway, resulting in the same targetability.
The actual historical rationale for the top menu bar was different, as explained by Bill Atkinson in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44338182. The problem was that due to the small screen size, non-maximized windows often weren't wide enough to show all menus, and there often wasn't enough space vertically below the window's menu bar to show all menu items. That's why they moved the menus to the top of the screen, so that there always was enough space, and despite the drawback, as Atkinson notes, of having to move the mouse all the way to the top. This drawback was significant enough that it made them implement mouse pointer acceleration to compensate.
So targetability wasn't the motivation at all, that is a retconned explanation. And the actual motivation doesn't apply anymore on today's large and high-resolution screens.
> With desktop monitor sizes since 20+ years ago, the distance you have to travel, together with the visual disconnect between application and the menu bar, negates the easier targetability.
Try it on a Mac; the way its mouse acceleration works makes it really, really easy to just flick either a mouse or a finger on a trackpad and get all the way across the screen.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily harder to reach a menu bar at the top of the screen, given suitable mouse acceleration. But you also have to move the mouse pointer back to whatever you are doing in the application window, and moving to the top menu bar is not that much (if at all) easier to really justify the cognitive and visual separation. It that were the case, then as many application controls as possible should be moved to the border of the screen.
I've been on Mac for 20 years and it's still annoying as hell.
Another side effect is the uselessness of the Help menu. What help am I looking at? The application owns the menu, so where's the OS help?
Oh right, it's just all mixed together. When I'm searching for information in some developer tool I'm using, I really enjoy all the arbitrary hits from the OS help about setting up printers, sending E-mail, whatever.
There are videos out there where CHM interviewed Bill Atkinson. One part has him go over old Polaroids of Lisa interface drafts. There, he justifies the menu bar at the top of the screen differently: they couldn't figure out what to do when the menu was too wide.for the window when the user made it narrow.
Huh. I wonder why they thought this was such a big deal. I mean... the user caused the problem, and could easily fix it by enlarging the window. Other windowing GUIs handle this just fine.
I'm not sure if it was user tested, but IIRC part of the problem was that there was no visual indication that the menu bar is cut off and some of the commands are inaccessible. We need to remember that this was new - they were introducing a GUI to the masses for the first time ever. Everything hat to be extremely clear.
Good point, and surely a valid concern... one that Apple has forgotten in some places today. Look at the utterly useless icon/thumbnail view in Finder: Contents don't wrap within the window. There could be dozens or hundreds of files off-screen in limbo, and you'll never know.
There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.
Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.
When scrollbars are not hidden, icons out of view are more discoverable. This used to be the only way Finder windows worked; there was no option to hide scrollbars. But the Apple decided scrollbars should hide by default, and be very narrow, and be low-contrast… hélas, hélas, c'est pour toujour.
Ah yes, this old argument. Except nobody slams his cursor against the top of the screen in real life, assuming that the menu bar is "infinitely tall." Watch real users interact with a Mac's menu, and you simply won't see this behavior. Not to mention that it doesn't work if you're using a laptop and a second monitor positioned behind and above it.
And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.
But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.
The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.
So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.
I fully agree with you that the menu bar placement in macOS is really weird and confusing and rather inconvenient (regardless of any claimed benefits per Fitt's Law). It's ironic that it ended up being a benefit in the age of UX enshittification solely because it forces apps to have the menu in the first place (although I increasingly see apps that do the bare minimum there and hide the rest behind hamburger menus in the apps).
Exactly. The single menu causes quite a few problems, both obvious and subtle.
But yeah... now I'm relieved when I go home from work and get back on my Mac. I waste so much time hunting for stuff on Windows now... it's just incredible.
Pompous pedants used to trot out "Fitt's Law" in defense of the Mac's dumb menu all the time, when in fact it contra-indicates it:
"Fitts’ law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes."
Right, so where should an application's menu go? ON ITS WINDOW. Not way up at the top of the screen. It's as if the people citing this "law" don't even read it.
> This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
I disable the title bars on almost everything I use. Except some custom applications that resist such attempts. I do not give a rat's ass what is open, it's already immediately obvious. Just wasting valuable screen real-estate.
For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"
Yes there are limits to how long the title will go until it starts getting truncated so it is possible it won't fit a network path. I'm not sure if the behaviour of the taskbar was always to bring every window of an app to the foreground? But yes I don't think that's a thing either.
It's really the most interesting thing I read in this screed, the rest of which seemed to be clueless BS like, "changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet."
No. Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon, Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet. They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store. It's tiresome to hear the same anti-"big-tech" hysteria aimed at Apple. They aren't a monopoly, period.
But back to this: "The App Store policies hurt privacy"
No, they don't. The plaintiff bases this admittedly novel whine on the fact that Google and its ilk make money on things other than their software. So by that logic, every company that doesn't conduct business through its app hurts every company that does. Give us a break.
So what? Controlling how many fart apps are available on its platform does not make Apple a gatekeeper to any part of the Internet. Apple does not funnel Web traffic into its properties.
Think it through: Amazon dominates shopping-search results. It easily swamps any other shopping portal or indie vendor. So it is a de facto gatekeeper to a huge portion of online shopping. You're citing Apple's alleged 58% of phone-platform share as making it a gatekeeper to the Internet? Amazon is actually an Internet-based entity with huge dominance in its field.
Meanwhile Meta (Facebook) IS the Internet for a large (less tech-savvy) portion of the public. Akin to when AOL slapped Internet access onto its platform.
Apple controls its app store. Is it douchey as hell to developers? Yep. Has it antagonized governments and flouted legal rulings? Yep. Has it lied about App Store search? Yep.
But it is not an Internet gatekeeper or a monopoly.
The Internet and the Web are not the same thing. Apple absolutely gatekeeps the ability to run non-HTTP internet connected apps. Your statement that Apple is not a “gatekeeper to any part of the Internet” is simply false.
> So what? Controlling how many fart apps are available on its platform does not make Apple a gatekeeper to any part of the Internet.
Controlling what kind of software, including _web browsers_, runs on the main device for the majority of the US population, does not make it a gatekeeper? That doesn't make any sense to me. Want to go to Amazon? You need an app or a browser to access it, both of these are controlled by Apple on its devices. Meta/Facebook? Same.
No, it does not. Does the cable company's forcing of you to use DOCSIS-compliant modems control what Web sites you access? No.
Does WebKit direct you to certain sites or block sites based on their content? Does it capture your search terms and curate the results? Does it aggregate content? Does it funnel your viewing to certain sites preferentially? No.
You keep attempting to assert that the viewing tool curates what you view with it. WebKit doesn't. Even if you raise technical points (doesn't support Web MIDI or something), those still don't prevent you from visiting any site you want. Even if a site were totally broken for technical reasons, it doesn't amount to deliberate curation by Apple.
Webkit does limit the sites I can visit, or equivalently the technologies that websites can use, because it doesn't support them. Which is _fine_ for a web browser, if it wasn't the case that Apple effectively used to mandate all web browsers on iOS to use Webkit.
In practice I think he is right unfortunately. Most people would just run Chrome and more websites would require Chrome since they could just tell Apple users to deal with it, making the mono-culture even worse.
Yes I have, I worked with it for years, there's the officially supported standards and then there's the buggy reality you have to deal with. I've encountered bugs with backgrounds, zIndex, videos, forms, localStorage, SVGs, all basic browser features.
Then Safari also is the last non-evergreen browser so it's the slowest to update compared to all the other browsers. If you have a bug, there's a good chance you'll have it for years
Evergreen refers to the speed of update, your average iPhone user takes one year and half to update. Your average Chrome user is updated within 3 weeks, your average Firefox user within 4 weeks.
Call it with another word if you want but Safari is on a league of its own.
If you serve web pages, you likely serve many of your users on their Apple devices. And you can’t support features of the web for those users if Apple doesn’t want them to have those features, and prohibits browsers with other engines that do support them on their App Store, and prohibits other sources of web browsers.
Yes you did: "Try shipping a web browser not based on Apple’s browser functionality on iOS. See how free of gatekeeping the internet is."
And no, it isn't. Not supporting certain browser features does not direct traffic or even deny access. So you obviously don't know what gatekeeping is.
A) it’s not irrelevant at all. Perhaps you don’t do web design, or perhaps you restrict your designs to functionality Apple doesn’t actively or passively prohibit.
Then you might not be aware that Apple does not support everything other browsers support. Or takes longer to support some things.
The internet has two ends (at least), media source and media user. Both ends require compatible software for any connection to work or work fully.
B) Of course I omit other irrelevant issues. No need for argumentative non-points.
A suggestion that would help me understand you better:
Instead of simply dismissing points out of hand, respond with reasoned thoughts.
Maybe you have a sensible viewpoint?
I have no issue learning from you.
If you can communicate how Apple blocking alternate browser engines doesn’t actually block other browser’s additional web functionality, please explain your work around.
I would appreciate any solution you have. So would many others.
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Apple also prohibits (via there App Store) non-browser apps based on how they use the Internet. So that’s additional gate keeping of Internet functionalit.
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Read Apple’s App Store guidelines for developers. Apple is up front and clear about all these restrictions and prohibitions.
I am lost as to what you are trying to claim they allow, that they openly document they don’t allow.
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Perhaps you have confused internet functionality with Internet addresses.
Indeed, Apple doesn’t block IPs.
But some kind of software at both ends is still required to communicate across the Internet. And blocking specific kinds of Internet functionality at one end, effectively blocks it from both ends, on their locked down devices.
You have confused "Web functionality" with gatekeeping.
You can use WebKit to visit any site you want; whether it supports every technical feature you might encounter on a site is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that it's a good engine or even competitive. I don't question your objections to missing functionality, and probably agree with all of them. But that is not gatekeeping. That's like saying black-&-white TVs were "gatekeeping" by not showing color, or some Bluetooth speakers are "gatekeeping" by not being stereo.
Anyway, the point is moot because Apple has to allow other browser engines now. If you think it through, this will simply allow Chrome to completely dominate the Web and take us backward to the bad old days of "this site works best on..."
How is that gatekeeping? Does Webkit prevent you from visiting certain sites, or funnel you to others?
No.
And the browser-engine ban is being lifted; something that sounded good at first, until you realize that Chrome is already a cancer on the Web that is only held back to the dominance of Safari on mobile. Cheerleading for a total takeover by Chrome isn't smart if you think it through.
> They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store.
They also control the OS and don't allow side-loading or other app stores (without putting absurd obstacles in the way) So in the end they completely control the devices they sell.
The end user is _NOT_ forced to buy into their ecosystem though.
There are alternatives, and depending on where on this globe you ask, apple is not even the one with the biggest marketshare.
So while I'm not against the general outcry and need for change, it is not just apple. The problem is way way bigger, and it should not be put onto one of the players in my opinion.
Create regulation/platform that sets the limits, then put ALL players into the process not just one
The difference is that we can easily try to pretend that game consoles are not general purpose computers. And doing so is not going to cause issues to the fabric of the society.
Hahaha, wow, OK. Then we must acknowledge that we're talking about PHONES here, and the applications on it are optional TOYS. The phone could have no app store at all, and still be highly functional and complete. In fact... that's how the iPhone launched. There was no app store for years.
Meanwhile, a game system with no games is not functional at all.
No, they are general purpose computers that can also work as cellphones.
The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs. This situation only lasted a year though.
It did have a pre-installed Google Maps app, very much not a toy...
And don't game consoles typically come out bundled with some first party games too ?
"The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs"
What a laughably wrong assertion. The iPhone handled all kinds of PIM data and synced with computers. There was no requirement (or even expectation) that a "smart" phone had third-party applications.
I had no idea it survived.