Re:Ask HN: What have we lost in tech and society?
by nicbou on Saturday September 24, 2022 @02:42AM
(#32960215)
> The idea of using app X to write some files... but then app Y to store or compress them, app Z to search them
This is why an iPad is not a laptop replacement.
It blows my mind that the current generation of students doesn't quite grasp the concept of files. I don't quite grasp how you can do serious work without operating on files.
Re:Ask HN: What have we lost in tech and society?
by nikau on Sunday September 25, 2022 @02:16AM
(#32969336)
I got caught out with the new version of Excel - opened up another sheet to use as a template, make some changes, then did a save-as to the new name.
Turns out all the changes were auto saving into the original sheet also.
I miss having a distinction between standalone apps and web apps.
The war on general purpose computing has been quite effective.
Everything has ended up like on a phone, where you have dozens of apps that barely interoperate, you are running app A, or you switch to app B, but you can't really compose them.
The idea of using app X to write some files... but then app Y to store or compress them, app Z to search them, etc like good old fashioned UNIX pipelines, shell scripts, or macros has died, and people no longer think that way. Instead, they store their data "inside" the app or the cloud... so they need the app to search, backup, export, restore, etc... and if the app doesn't do that, there is no hope of operating on the same data with other software.