HN user

jeffkeen

362 karma

Developer, designer, leading with curiosity. Tiny phones, unpopular technology, great radio, taking things apart to put them back together.

Trying to learn to live a little better in this mortal coil every day.

Posts3
Comments44
View on HN

I’d love to see how you use it. My encounters with jest have been painful, and it seemed unnecessarily cruel to run browser tests in node, where you couldn’t just easily put a debugger statement in there and use the inspector to see what was going on.

Apple Rankings 4 years ago

Really missed an opportunity not naming this site "How do you like them apples?"

Incredible! I have a couple of old Macs lying around and it's a dream of mine to write a native app for them that does something modern, like a way to control spotify of something. Thanks for linking

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.

The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around with things… and I looovvvved the zaniness that provided. To name a few:

- ResEdit! - Extensions that could seriously improve your computer's performance like RamDoubler or SpeedDoubler - That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash - The talking moose was fun for about 15 minutes, but still, I love the attitude. - After Dark! - Easter eggs like that "secret about box" text clipping thing that pulled up the pirate flag flying over the Apple Campus. - Playful messaging like "Installing System Morsels", or Sim City 2000's "Reticulating Splines" - Even the iconography was more playful—that little bloated mac icon in the Memory control panel next to Virtual Memory comes to mind

I miss the crew of developers, capabilities, and playfulness we lost in transitioning to OSX, but am thrilled that tiny fragments of this playfulness seem to be returning.

Welcome back Clarus! Moof!

VS code feels so third-party-extension and custom-config dependent and I’m sure OP has their VS code settings _just right_ for them, but that does not make it a good editor for everyone.

I love this community, but the people who are comfy configuring Linux and cant understand why everyone doesn’t roll their own solutions generally don’t know shit about what good UX is.

VScode ain’t it, that’s for sure.

f.lux 4 years ago

This comment reminded me that when I used flux and I'd work late, I'd reach a point where I'd get _tired_ because the blue light was gone (and I had my flux settings cranked). I haven't felt the same way with Apple's Night Shift.

Hotline was such a great moment in time. I downloaded my first mp3 from hotline, and remember chatting with people and browsing files and making connections being one of my first “the internet is incredible!” moments. I can still hear the _sounds_ of that app.

I hope Adam is well, whatever he’s up to.

I’m crazy about coffee mugs, and I love that you asked this question on HN! I’ve got answers for you.

Lately CB2 (and crate and barrel) have been killing it on their classy mug collection, so take a look at these three beauties that I’ve been enjoying my coffee in lately

https://www.cb2.com/axel-caramel-mug/s475787

https://www.cb2.com/cast-reactive-glaze-black-mug/s212966

https://www.crateandbarrel.com/18th-street-mug/s357738

I think they’re my top 3 favorite mugs in the cabinet right now, which is really something given they’re all so easily attainable and don’t have some novel origin story.

The thing that drives adoption from regular folk is making it dead easy to hop on to whatever the solution/product is. Most average joes who aren’t as fired up philosophically about these issues won’t go adopting a product that’s a rough time to use even if it’s for the greater good, and the Venn diagram of bleeding edge fringe future thinker tech solutions and great user experiences don’t often overlap.

I'm actually right there with you with your development related digs on Apple. They're draconian, and it's only gotten worse in the Tim Cook era. The major beef I've had with them the last decade are the whole slew of absurd (imo) hardware/design decisions and tiny oversights that never would've flown under the old Apple. Losing the headphone port to get a slightly thinner phone nobody was asking for? Shipping those damn butterfly keyboards? Ditching MagSafe power cords for "USB C everywhere" (but not on phones and not all usb C cables are power cables)? Pushing the Touch Bar like it’s the solution to everything when it solves nothing? Da fuq? I could go on. Just one silly thing after the other while I imagine them all patting themselves on the back for a job well done while watching that money pour in. And the prices! Macs were always expensive but damn did this last set of Pro level laptops and desktops get stupid expensive.

It's almost like they put a numbers guy in the CEO role of a formerly design obsessed company and the metric turned from "is this insanely great?" to "will this get us to the _next_ trillion dollars?"

So yeah, as a lifelong Apple user I've had some major beef. There's plenty to complain about. But with that all being said, I’ve been pretty happy experience and productivity wise running an old 2013 MacBook Pro and and a tiny iPhone SE and never considered leaving the Apple ecosystem, because honestly… what’s the alternative? Windows feels like nonsense to me, Google is privacy nightmare, and going full Linux feels like… work. I'm sure it would be possible to carve out a nice system and find some linux gui that doesn't look like complete garbage, tweak my settings just right, and find all the free versions of the apps I need. But at the end of the day I don't think I'd get that "it just works" feeling I still get with Mac OS—for me I'd think it'd feel like a successfully completed science project.

So for me, even at their worst, Apple is still best. And this M1 news and the new iPhone form factors (the 12 mini, specifically) has given me some hope that maybe they haven't completely lost their way.

I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way.

I'm not trying to have an argument here, but I've never really understood what is the "exactly how you want" that Mac OS doesn't provide? Would you mind sharing some details? Is it just a matter of not being familiar with the places to change the defaults to something more to your liking, or is it actually missing the ability to do something you need?

I've been a Mac user since the 80s, I write software for a living, and I understand that among tech folk there is a continental divide between convention and configuration, and I think that might translate to choice in OS, too. Seems to me that most Mac users are on the convention over configuration side, and most people who are anti-MacOS are the opposite; they want to configure every bit. Just wondering if that's the case here, too, or if there's more to it specifically.

Castle Quest is the game my family measured all games against for couple of decades following its release. There is no way that game will live up to my expectations if I attempt to play it again now.