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Trawling through bad documentation and even worse Stack Overflow answers to figure out how to use some API was not using my brain functions. It was wasting my time and making me lose the flow of the important parts of my work.

I used to lose entire days trying to figure out some stupid error in a build chain or trying to upgrade through some library's breaking change. Now I can get it done in a few minutes and I don't believe I've lost out on any great "problem solving opportunities."

Like most of this stuff, it's obviously impressive technology compared to what existed a few years ago. But the end product has zero artistic value. It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.

A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.

Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years

But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.

Is IEC really the gold standard for connectors to you? I always thought they feel terrible to plug in. There's no snap or solid bottom-out indication to when it's "connected." And it just sits in the socket from friction that doesn't feel particularly solid. It's the kind of connection where if it gets yanked a little bit and the connection fails, it's not obvious because it's half-seated in the socket.

In Canada our postal codes are formatted:

X#X #X#

Where X is a letter and # is a digit.

The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling.

Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practically every input on the internet accepts spaces but has a max character limit. So if I paste it in with the spaces, it'll cut off the last 3 digits, making me go back, delete the spaces, and manually type in my last 3 digits that were removed.

A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.

The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.

Audiobooks do not feel like disconnecting. It feels like another app on my smart device pumping digital sound into my ears.

Leaving my devices inside and sitting on the porch, reading a book feels much healthier for my brain. And more intentional consumption than passive noise to kill time.

it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address

That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.

The delete button is labelled "delete (trash)"

Never change, FOSS UIs

The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.

Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.

The rebooted Doom trilogy is more or less the only FPS games I've ever particularly enjoyed

DOOM was always intended to be brutal, but not like this

The writing's been on the wall about physical games going away for quite some time now.

You can tell the PS5 was designed to be a digital-first system by the disc drive slapped on the side like a tumour hanging off the otherwise symmetrical body.

Slight correction. Last generation was the Xbox One (already a confusing name because some people thought that was referring to the original first Xbox)

A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase.

The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess?

But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.

Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform.

With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.

It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO.

Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.

To me it's mostly unfortunate that this has left PlayStation with no direct competition because they've noticed and leaned into the not-giving-a-shit attitude after they had such a great console generation with the PS4. It's kinda crazy that we're already almost due for a new console generation and there's very little appetite for new consoles after this generation where it feels like it barely got started. And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. The industry is in a very strange state.

I'm preparing to release my first app to the App Store and they're currently requiring me to dox myself if I want to sell in the EU. Which facts am I missing that makes this not very inconvenient for me?

Feels weird to be complaining about this stuff when all of these AI companies are still haemorrhaging money to offer these services.

You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.

You can verify from my comment history that I love talking shit about Mr Dye as much as the next guy, but no. Car Play limitations are certainly not an Alan Dye decision. Everything in CarPlay is stripped down cause it's not safe to be navigating menus and doing deep interactions while driving.

The passenger can use the phone if you want to be able to scroll through an artist's catalog, rearrange playlists, etc. CarPlay's UI is a quick way to access your current library.

It wasn't nearly as good 2 years ago.

I don't think it's fair to compare development for web, which is supposed to be an open standard, with developing for a proprietary piece of hardware like the Playstation.

If you want to develop a game for the Switch and ignore the Playstation entirely, you can, and then you don't need a Playstation (dev kit).

When you're developing for the web, you're ideally making something that runs regardless of the user's browser. When you start getting bug reports in from Safari users, how else are you supposed to fix them? Cheapest option is detect if they're a Safari user and tell them to use another browser, but that's not really ideal for anyone except Google.

This has been known for quite a while; when I published an Android app ~10 years ago I saw lots of people advising you to create a separate Google account to publish apps under, because a robot can just terminate your entire online identity for the crime of trying to contribute to Google's app ecosystem.

I left behind Android and as many Google services as I could in 2020 and so far I've only been more vindicated with that decision over time.

I don't think that matters in a court of law.

There needs to be lawsuits over stuff like that. I don't get why people accept blatant false advertising just cause the tech used to do it is new. They may as well be uploading pictures of a real, nicer apartment with a similar layout. What's the difference?

Apple's own app icons look blurry in iOS 26.

They look fine when zoomed in, and I'm assuming that's all the designers considered as they were redrawing icons, blown up across their 27" monitor. But once you shrink them down to an actual app icon size, the glassy effects on the edges of everything look like a blur.

In iOS 27 they sharpened the edges up and everything looks a lot better.

I think most university graduates from the past ~15 years are more likely to get taken in by trendy new cargo-cult fads than repeat things taught to them by dinosaurs in their boring university classes.

Is there something you perceive as unfair about judging a guy on the output of the work he was responsible for over a long period of time?

Are you suggesting Gruber is upset at Dye for leaving Apple?

We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.

The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.

That's not the "it's not just X—it's Y" AI tell that I assume you've seen other people call out.

It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.