qwzybug

Done:

[x] Identify a problem ("overpaid millennial techies don't keep track of their spending because they just can't be arsed")

[x] Waste a bunch of time shipping a mobile app six people will ever use

[x] Write self-important, poorly-copyedited Medium post

These are the most visible parts of the design process, but they won't get you success unless you're reeeeeally good in a room with some pretty rich, dumb motherfuckers. (I am made to understand this is getting harder and harder lately.)

Not done:

[ ] Hard stuff?

[ ] Research design process: what else happens??? (<- this sounds hard)

The difficult, meaningful stuff no one really seems to give much of a shit about anymore. Except, of course, the people making good and interesting work that will actually matter a few years from now, and not just destroy a bunch of wealth and effort. But they don't write Medium posts.

Be more like them.

Frustrating!

    wget http://some.dudes.site/cool_stuff.tar
    untar cool_stuff.tar
    cd cool_stuff
    ls

    cat ./ls
    
    #!/usr/bin/my-favorite-scripting-language
    
    do_sneaky_things :with => AllOfYourStuff && `rm -rf /`

[Flash] appears to under-perform on every platform I have except Windows (Windows in VMware + Flash is better than native Mac Flash, I swear!).

Flash has been an albatross for Mac users for a decade. It has performed terribly, crashed our browsers, and with the rise of YouTube &co. forced us to use it to watch videos via a hilarious, incredible, inefficient hack instead of a real native video player.

We are really (and understandably) happy to get rid of it, especially if that means we get to skip the worst kinds of ads and online videos don't churn the CPU anymore.

For all its usefulness, Flash just isn't worth the hassle for Mac users, and it's largely Adobe's fault that we find this to be the case.

If this is actually in Apple's plans, running iOS apps on MacOS wouldn't be much harder than making these frameworks first-class citizens... plus a whole lot of work reconciling the fundamentally different interaction, document, window, and application models. (Guess which of those 80 and which is 20. :)

If Apple lets us write apps that run on both platforms, I would expect the desktop versions to include substantially different resources and have fairly divergent codebases: different nibs, different build processes (perhaps with the disparate binaries packaged into one .app bundle), different interaction metaphors etc.

UIKit would be a kludge with multitouch trackpads, and downright useless without one all together.

This is largely true, but there's more to UIKit than touchesBegan:withEvent:. In particular, UIKit's view controllers/navigation controllers/table views could work quite well on OS X (and looking at iLife '09 and the preview of full-screen apps in Lion, this seems quite likely). Further, more iPhone apps use these classes than do advanced multitouch.

Again, this is not to say that writing one app that could conceivably run on both platforms will be at all easy; I still think the OP is way off the mark about that. But it's not unthinkable.

Dave might be right in broad strokes, but the post is very muddy on what it would mean for "iOS apps" to run on the MacOS.

Fundamentally, it would be pretty straightforward for Apple to allow iOS apps to be easier to port to the MacOS: bringing some of the UIKit APIs to desktop Cocoa would make things very much easier. As it is, anything that touches images or the user interface has essentially zero overlap between the desktop and mobile APIs. Very frustrating.

However, the speculation about MacOS on the Air being a "compatibility layer" is utterly ludicrous and unfounded. A quick peek inside /System/Library/Frameworks will indicate that the build of 10.6.4 that runs on the Air uses exactly the same set of frameworks that Apple has built up for the MacOS as any other traditional computer they sell.

While the brief preview of Lion given the other week indicates that there will be significant cross-pollenation between desktop and mobile OSes for Apple, in both user interface and (one assumes) APIs, it's hard to exaggerate how off-base this particular item of speculation is, in the right-here and right-now.

I would be unsurprised to see a third architecture added to "Universal" iOS apps to allow them to be run on Lion desktops, but as any iOS developer can tell you, even porting an app from the iPhone to the iPad is hardly a set-it-and-forget-it affair. Winer snarks about the multitouch trackpad at the end of this article, but he's just as wrong about it now as he was when he first said it.

The iPhone is a fundamentally different user experience from the iPad is a fundamentally different user experience from the MacBook Air, even if 10.6.5 + Mac App Store includes all of UIKit.

Listen: for the first time in history, ordinary people are actually using computers, every day, in their real lives, and we're kicking and screaming as hard as we can against the systems that have made that the case.

The future is different from the past. The coders who are empowering creativity on iOS (and similar devices) aren't the ones whining about how hard it is. Get over your ridiculous nostalgia, stop bitching, and write BASIC for the 21st century.

Apple got rid of disks, why not get rid of the images too?

However, I still think the multiple-window model is powerful when single-tasking with multiple tools. In XCode, for example, I always run in the "Condensed" layout; the file list is in one window, the editor is another, as are docs, the console, the debugging HUD, etc. It lets me put things where I want them to be: console and debugger on the second monitor, documentation side-by-side with the editor, etc. And I can scootch them around to make room to see a terminal window, or IRC in a dev chat, or whatever.

It means I do spend a little more time on the resize handle than I would hitting a mythical Mac "maximize" button, but trying to use single-window IDEs feels like walking in mud in comparison. (I'm looking at you, XCode 4.)

I tend to use Spaces to focus on tasks. One neat trick: you can manage windows from the Spaces zoomed-out view. Drag your IDE or text editor to another space, or shift-drag to grab all an app's windows at once. You can even engage Expose in Spaces and drag windows from that view. I never find myself wanting a window filling the screen, especially with modern resolutions.

Point taken on ircle. I'm just nostalgic.

Command-option-H. You'll like it.

I like the deemphasis on full-screen windows in Mac OS; one of the biggest losses in OSX UIs of the last decade is that they've moved from the exceedingly customizable palette-style UI (see ircle, for example—an IRC client with the entry box in a different window from the chat log!) to the iTunes-inspired, all-features-in-one-window style.

The ability to use the windowing system to split your focus between different documents and apps for the same task (instead of maximizing every damn thing, like most Windows users I know) was powerful; the current approach reeks of MDI. (As does Adobe CS5—git yer damn tabs outta my Photoshop, Adobe.)

PS - Personally, I can't stand the mouse acceleration curves on Windows. "In matters of taste, there can be no dispute."

If you expect drivers to yield to you, give you your lane, and (most importantly) not actively work to bring about your death, you can't be weaving in and out of traffic, running red lights, or not letting cars through to turn at intersections. Even if you don't give half a damn about your own life, it's just simple courtesy.

In general, people on bicycles in DC combine the worst parts of the "urban road warrior" cyclist stereotype with the intense sense of entitlement and privilege shared by most in the DC area: "why the fuck should I stop at a red light? I have places to be. I saw David Axelrod at Ruth's Chris yesterday. Do you know who the fuck I am?"

The drivers are insane as well, but I want to grab most of the cyclists I see around here by the shoulders and shake them hard: "Do you want to die??!? DO YOU??!!!?" They are just the worst and sicken me deeply every day.

Disclaimer: I am a frequent cyclist in DC.

Also note that Facebook's only actual revenue stream is ads.

[1] http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-p...

Apple has gotten the closest—I'm amazed that they haven't gotten more good press about 99c TV show rentals, as it's essentially a la carte ad-free cable, which is supposed to have been the holy Grail of video content for the last two decades—and the fact that iAds and AdMob have become so popular so quickly is a sad indicator of how difficult it is to make money by actually making something, even on iOS.

But yes, point taken. :)

He was the Joel Spolsky of the Middle Ages, I'm telling you.

The retina display makes a huge difference for reading, so I tend to use the iPhone for feeds and things, but for anything creative the iPad is the clear winner.

It relies pretty heavily on a lot of internal DNC technologies, though I'm sure the Republicans have similar systems.

Also, I'm not sure the Republicans could afford it… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/rnc-re-assigning-ne...

Plus, Bender learned how to knit!