gargs

I actually have suffered from a cut. It's ridiculously sharp.

Apple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.

When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy Finder.

For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.

What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.

If their problem was 'too many developers', I reckon they'd be building totally useless yet amazingly engineered SDKs and data/analytics tools or apps to improve the quality and satisfaction of your music consumption. Instead, they focus on all the things that just reek of an overabundance of marketers and Product People™.

Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.

Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.

We only had dial-up connections with a real IPv4 address back when I used ICQ.

It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.

Maybe, but Apple has proven to be exceptionally bad at rolling out their services globally if they fail to obtain some arbitrary scale.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118205

This was my immediate thought upon seeing the title! I used to love the library telnet server, which worked for searching, placing a hold, renewing, and even inter-library loans. There was also rudimentary full-text search of engineering journals. Today, it's a 'modern' website with tons of whitespace, non-customizable fonts, and links out to events and what not. Simplicity is such a wonderful feature and yet it's somehow completely orthogonal to modern engineering.

...and after passing that hurdle, you're suddenly exposed to a large body of work in the organization that has no processes to ensure continuity and modernization other than some rudimetary coding styles and PR/code review flows. The only way to stick around is to make your output so incomprehensible that the only way to maintain it is to keep the lead around.

For all the talk about hiring the best, once they're in the goal becomes to stop hands-on development as quickly as possible and to add friction to improving the knowledge repository as much as possible.

Gatekeeping also has something to do with this.

Bad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch.

It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways.

From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win.

This is why we need competition.

This is the courageous Apple we've all been waiting for. One that doesn't think twice about antagonizing its users just to throw a tantrum.

Unless it is doctors' notes or prescriptions.

Would this help in getting jobs as much as a real MBA would?

I have to wonder how much of this middle management heavy organizational structure was introduced by cultures that place undue significance to 'becoming a manager' in computing success in profession.

In my case, it appears that maximizing my download has a huge impact on my upload as well, which makes sense from a TCP/IP point of view. In this case, do you mean the ISP's flow control?

It seems to grossly underestimate my upload bandwidth!

I appreciate the QR code menus in busy spots in Amsterdam (almost every terrace when the weather is nice). It means I could spend more time with family instead of standing in a line with people fumbling around. Service usually sucks anyway, and so the less time I could spend in line ordering the better! The PDF links are useless, but busy places will often link to a portal that also allows ordering, paying, customizing, and sometimes even has a quick repeat option for drinks. It's easier for the business (they don't have to explain the menu to everyone in the line) and also reduces friction for customers; who doesn't have a phone anyway, especially those with kids.

While there might be some tracking or what not, it's probably less harmful than all the other tracking going on, including even the carrier's own systems.

The irony is that regional smaller banks would now be supporting larger banks with insurance contributions if unlimited deposit insurance becomes a real perpetual thing.

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Remote: 100%

Willing to relocate: Perhaps

Technologies: Swift, Swift on Server, Objective-C, Cocoa, Catalyst, SwiftUI

Resume/CV: https://gargs.com

Email: saurabh@gargs.com

Currently working on my first full-stack solo app while freelancing.

I have a production app live using Swift/Vapor. I created this app solely for the purpose of learning full-stack development using Swift, and so far it has been an amazing ride. The best thing about using Swift on the server if you're already an iOS developer is that a ton of models and DTOs are simply shared across your backend and your app(s).

I have deployed my backend on a tiny DO droplet using Docker, and it just works. There was a slight bit of learning curve for deploying it, but I can now create images locally on my Mac and pull them remotely for a fresh deployment/migration in less than a minute. Being able to build locally using Docker for Mac also means that the speed is great.

Before that, I had the app live on a Heroku setup but it cost quite a bit.

My app is at https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/instint/id1454800508

Is Web2 Bullshit?

SEEKING WORK | Amsterdam | Remote

iOS development freelancer with experience building apps spanning all the releases of iOS. More recently, developing full-stack using Swift on the server as well as learning staple technologies/tools like Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.

Check out website for latest CV - https://www.gargs.com

This has always been how abandoned communities are offered a chance to stay alive...at least for the last 15(?) years or so.

Unless you use your television solely to experience encryption-free OTA programming, any cable provider or streaming app has the capability to sell your viewership data to third parties.

You're right. Editing.

Any Safari extension could theoretically do the same, even if it is available on the AppStore. I doubt app review does security audits of extensions they approve.

revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before

This sounds very disingenuous. Starbucks was arguably the first 'community brand' where people would associate one with an informal meeting place rather than to drink a coffee. Even in Silicon Valley, there are cafe chains renowned for this meeting vibe.

And then there are country clubs, which are newer and more bourgeois.

Even the neighborhood newspaper kiosk in historical European cities did a better job of bringing community and brand to real estate than WeWork.

The thing is that interviewing is hard; it is a full-time job, really, and one that could make or break the company. At the same time, interviewing is not something that current employees are remunerated for, materially or even in terms of time. It is very rare for deadlines to move because half the team is conducting interviews.

So, what ends up happening is that nearly everyone in the interviewing process ends up half-arsing it - from the recruiters who prefer to contact nearly everyone eligible based on some keyword searches - to the engineers who have no time to be thorough - to the hiring manager who usually has a bunch of fires to extinguish.

A few companies do tend to put quantifiable metrics around their processes but they're usually too reactive and inconsequential.

The interviewers have a vested interest in being more productive by hiring the best people, but at the same time, there is personal friction against hiring someone good/better when your own promotion is hanging barely by the 'meets expectations' thread.

Now the assignments - they're almost always totally useless. Like, build a new app based on a third party API and then make sure to test it. Useless because of multiple reasons - the API is nothing like what you use at work; your current product team has coalesced around some archaic architecture that no Greenfield app would use; it's the take home assignment of the month (like the favorite 'build a movie app using the OMDb API'). A better alternative would be to open up your own API and perhaps a module of your current production app and add something to it, create a PR, or even just fix a bug or two. I actually think asking candidates to document a module is much more useful than asking them to write code you would never use, even if you pay for such an assignment.

Onsite interviews are even more useless - it's usually the most vocal people asking esoteric questions about older technology or algorithms that they've had success with candidates stumbling upon. Again, almost none of the whiteboard exercises or questions are from real-world scenarios.

You could pay candidates for the interview process, but that doesn't even address why interviewing is so fundamentally broken. I bet we would have amazing software products if we just interviewed better, especially when companies have been able to lobby for right to work laws nearly everywhere.