felixding

I've always liked NeXTSTEP's distinctive user interface. I wish we had a version that ran on modern hardware, similar to what https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace is trying to achieve.

Also, Steve Jobs in Exile, the most recent book about NeXT, is highly recommended.

Have you tried Nextspace? The project is aiming to replicate the look and feel of NeXTSTEP.

Yes! If anyone wants to start such a project, call me in, or at least let me (and many others) support you financially.

I think about this all the time.

A high-quality replica takes tremendous effort and time, but it’s not really financially viable.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Oh, and I’d be super happy to pay for such a replica too! For example, $99 a year for a Mac OS X Jaguar to Tiger era skin/theme/desktop environment.

I grew up in China, where the first Star Wars movie wasn't released in theaters until 1999. It had probably been shown on TV in some cities before then, but Star Wars definitely wasn't a well-known pop culture phenomenon there.

The original Star Wars: TIE Fighter was one of the first computer games I played as a teenager. The funny thing is, I had absolutely no idea what Star Wars was, but somehow I still thought the game was really cool and played it for quite a while.

Exactly. Hard pass on a phone without a 3.5mm headphone jack.

People who say, “You can use a dongle” or “Just buy Bluetooth earphones” are missing the point. It’s never about what compromises we, as consumers, can make; it’s about users’ choices and preferences.

I’m fine with manufacturers wanting to make more money by selling dongles or Bluetooth earphones, but I’ll never accept them doing so by removing features to force us to buy them.

I used all of them in various projects: "traditional" Ajax-based SPAs, HTML over WebSockets/SSE, etc. Then I found Inertia.js and never looked back.

With Inertia.js, you get the real feel of an SPA without the complexity of maintaining APIs just for the frontend. You can even make some pages plain HTML (like the homepage, legal pages, etc.), while making pages that require reactivity SPAs.

Deterministic workflows still have plenty of use cases. AI agents can help build them, but can’t replace them when predictable and auditable execution matters, because agents are inherently nondeterministic.

That said, Relay.app announced its shutdown a few weeks ago, and now Flowise is winding down too. I wonder whether coding agents are really the cause, or whether these products simply struggled to find a sustainable market.

Disclosure: I’m building Aqua Blue (aquablue.app) around a related idea: AI builds the workflow, but fixed rules run it.

It’s not about what you offer on the free tier. It’s about whether what you say matches what you do.

If your page asks people to try the product, let them try it. Asking them to enter something and click “Try,” only to immediately hit a signup wall, is frustrating and makes them feel tricked.

Thank you! Finally, someone with insider knowledge telling the real story.

It's not safe or reliable, no matter how hard you try. Fundamentally, agents will try whatever they can to achieve the goal, as we've seen in many recent security incidents.

If determinism is important, as it is in many business use cases, use agents to build the tool, but don't let them run it.

I built a similar product around this exact idea: AI builds the workflow. Fixed rules run it.

Please don't let users "try" your product only to immediately hit a signup/signin wall. It instantly undermines whatever trust the demo may have established.

Maybe it’s because I’m old, but the classic Mac OS user interface looks so good. I’d trade the current Mac OS UI for it in a heartbeat. I’m already sticking with Sequoia because I don’t want Liquid Glass making my eyes sore.

Nitpicking:

“classic Mac OS”

not

“classic macOS”

> Ironically, Japanese menus almost universally have pictures of the food

For restaurants frequented by foreign tourists, yes. But for most ordinary restaurants, probably not. Handwritten menus with no pictures at all are still very common in Japan.

I work in food tech in Japan.

Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.

Just wow! I’m speechless! Can’t think of any other word than “legendary”.

Anything similar for Windows users? My wife is suffering from car sickness as she works on taxi a lot.

I’ve been helping teams automating their routine work using https://aquablue.app , an AI employees app I built.

For example, syncing orders from e-commerce sites to their internal spreadsheets, generating invoices with custom workflow etc

Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).

Exactly. I don't know why some people'd change the branding.

Exactly. Very clever name!

In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux:

https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

Wow, this is very close to an app I’m building. My take is that the key part is not just generating the workflow, but making it reviewable and deterministic enough that businesses can actually trust it.