Regular ass HTML and CSS works just as well as ever. Application frameworks solve problems that are convincing at hyper-giga Google scale (where an infinite number of participants and data models need to be consolidated) that aren't as important when I am trying to display words, pictures, and video to people across the world. For instance, if you're talking about advanced sharding, granular caches per data-field, or scaling microservices with the load on different parts of your application, then maybe you need something more complicated.
I like simple, and I like to be able to see changes I make in real time. React makes a lot of things more simple, so I use it often.
Same with iPhone. My mind was blown when after years of tapping left-arrow someone showed me what happens when you hold down the space key. Or that dragging the iphone chat message app's background to the left reveals the timestamps of each message.
It's all very clever and elegant and minimal but consumer technology user interfaces seem to be converging on that of a Theremin.
Only on Android, not iOS, I think. You've always been able to do this, even longer than you could pinch-zoom. Unfortunately, it seems to be going away—Chrome no longer zooms on double-tap-drag, nor do any of the Samsung apps (Samsung Internet, Photos, etc.).
I have a workaround for you: assistive touch under accessibility allows you to bring up an on-screen two-handle bar which lets you adjust zoom with one hand.
My full workflow for using this is triple click power key to bring up accessibility shortcuts, press assistive touch and then tap on the circle icon to bring up the bar. You can drag it around by dragging the middle and if you drag either bar end it does the “pinch”.
I put smart invert for pseudo dark mode and zoom in the other two accessibility shortcuts to round out the accessibility shortcut menu.
I so miss the days of the well structured and comprehensive manual. I used to read them end to end. Even if you didn't remember the details you knew what was possible.
I’ve never bought a new iPhone. Is there something included in the box to point people towards the online manuals? I’m making a hopefully safe assumption there wasn’t a manual in the box that GGP ignored.
I just opened my iphone 13 box and there is a paper slip that says "before use, please refer to the user guide <url>" Along with a few of the main safety points printed on the paper itself. When you start the iphone the first thing it makes you do is log in and then click through a series of tips and tricks pages but nothing stops you from clicking next through them without reading. They then put an app on the phone by default called "Tips" which explains all this stuff with images and videos.
At some point you just have to admit that there is realistically nothing more that can be done. Users don't want to read the manual because they can use their phone perfectly fine without it. They might not notice there is a nicer way to move the cursor but it doesn't really matter.
There is a manual and it comes preinstalled as an app out of only around 10 apps on the default screen and yet people still complain about the lack of a manual. I really don't know what they could do other than locking the phone until the user completes a quiz on the manual content.
yeah the mac, with the not even hand gestures, but almost nods and winks at things, is too stupid. If I'm 20 and want to seem hip, and spend 20 hours a day on my phone, then sure, maybe, I think that's cool.
But for the rest of the world, it's not. My mom can't use an iphone or android phone, because they cater too much to... the young? the rich? tech? geeks?
beats me... and I am a dev of > 30 years, that spends more of my time in front of my computer, than almost anyone I know. I love computers and tech, but am amazed that things have not become easier.
They are harder now then they ever were.
But having said that, Macs are all I've used for the last 10 years, because they seem, overall, better than any other OS I've used.
If you grab the right-hand edge of a window, you can drag it left or right to resize the window. However, if you instead drag it up or down, you can move the whole window.
And if you hold option (alt) when dragging left or right, it will mirror the drag on the opposite side, so you can quickly expand or contract the window size
Wait... you can actually maximise without going full screen? I thought Apple would never back down on that - I use a third-party app to do this usually. If there's a similar thing to let me make a window full height and half width, and to center a window, I can get rid of that app altogether...
Holding Option when clicking the green maximize button will expand the window without entering full screen mode. You know you're doing it right if the glyph inside the button turns from two triangles to a plus sign.
When I do this with for instance a Finder window, it just "zooms" it. You can get the same effect if you go to the Window menu -> Zoom. "zoom"ing tells macos to make the window fit the content that's inside of it, however the app feels like doing that, even if you damn well just want the window to be as big as it can be.
BUT, option + double-clicking any window corner will actually make even a Finder window take up the whole visible space of the screen without being "maximized" (without creating a new screen / workspace).
(double-clicking any corner will make the window expand all the way towards the corner you've clicked; if you have a finder window in the middle of the screen and you double-click the NE corner, it'll get bigger in the N and E directions until it hits the menu bar + the right edge of the screen.
similarly, double-clicking any edge will make the window expand all the way to the border of the screen in the direction of the edge you clicked, and option + double-clicking an edge makes it grow both in that direction and the opposite.)
completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.
> completely undiscoverable, I feel like I'm lost while Maniac Mansion, just trying every possible Verb + Object (+ Indirect Object) combination to try to read the game dev's mind.
I just found out that Apple has a pretty neat guide on all of this [1]. That you can find by googling or searching the builtin system help. I never looked at the system help before, but it looks like Apple did a good job documenting these features. Maybe I should start to RTFM for my OS...
I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better. It makes sense that there isn't a button for these commands, but if there isn't you need a manual or a tutorial and who is going to look at these? Maybe someone smarter has a better idea on how to solve this.
I browsed through the guide a bit, but it seems to be anything but comprehensive, rather it's quite similar to comment threads like this where there's a smattering of less-well-known hidden functionality among the more obvious stuff.
> I still agree on the discoverability part but I can't think of a way that would be better.
In Emacs, C-h m runs `describe-mode` which goes through the major mode of the current buffer and all the currently active minor modes, and puts their descriptions and all the mode-specific key/mouse bindings into a new Help buffer.
It would probably be incredible overkill, but I'd adore an overlay view in macos where each screen widget / distinct region had an outline or different shaded color overlaid on it, and when you hover each widget it shows you all the "keymaps" / event bindings for it. Give me all the knowledge; I use Emacs by choice for crying out loud.
That’s a specific setting, under Settings > Dock & Menu Bar > Double-click a window’s title bar to zoom | minimize. It should default to zoom on a fresh install.
Excellent, thanks — that's very helpful! It's not quite perfect — it does the old 'make it big, but not as big as possible' behaviour that macOS used to do, but that seems to be app-specific, so it actually does what I want for some things.
Double clicking on an edge will cause it to expand to the edge of the window. The shift + option trick doesn't just expand to the first edge it hits, it looks like both edges expand as much as possible.
So when combined with double clicking on a window corner, that makes all for edges expand to display size (even if the window was partially off the monitor).
By convention on Macs option more generally means "anchor at the center." The selection tool in a proper Mac graphics program, for example, will pin the center of the selection to the point where you clicked instead of pinning a corner there. Resizing shapes in a well-made diagramming app behaves this way too. Been this way since the '80s.
But you can't drag left or right first. If you do, you won't be able to move the window. You either have to decide which one you want to do on the first click.
It can still be a lot more efficient to grab the scrollbar to jump to a section of a large document. For example, you can instantly get to say 3/4 of the way through by moving the scroll bar a very short distance, which when done with the scroll wheel or trackpad gestures could take a very long time.
The scroll bar is also sometimes a nice visual cue to the size of a document you've just opened for the first time, again something the wheel/gestures don't necessarily inform.
I have permanent scroll bars enabled in macOS too.
It is pretty much required if your primary interaction with the computer is through a drawing tablet. My Wacom has a touch-sensitive wheel on it but it's usually a lot more natural to just poke at the scroll bar with the stylus.
I loathe the modern trend towards hiding all scroll bars everywhere because of this.
Looking at this very page! Using the middle mouse button takes me 3 or 4 seconds to move somewhere close to the bottom of the page, much faster and less frustrating to grab and drag the scroll bar. Is there some easier method I'm missing?
When the words Apple and Cloud come together I start to twitch.
It’s done to death that their web services are of dubious quality, and they have got better. However you don’t have to go very deep or use services for very long to find some very sharp edges.
Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see, but I get the impression that Apple's approach to developing products can lead to very good highs but pretty poor lows considering the amount of money they could easily invest, I would also be somewhat hesitant with an Apple Cloud unless they had something actually new to bring to the market other than basically rent-seeking for people who want to develop (say) CI pipelines for their products.
In middle school, a buddy of mine drew a beautiful picture of a Bugatti Veyron with a silver Pilot Dr. Grip Ltd. shaker pencil and I was so enamored by his drawing and his pencil. He spent weeks getting the details just right during downtime in math class.
It got me interested in stationary ever since then, and I've always loved JetPens. I've gone through phases where I really like mechanical pencils, although I mostly write with Uni Signo UM-151 0.38mm gel pens. Super smooth with a crisp, fine line.
JetPens is a great site with a very cool niche. Check out Kinokuniya too. There's one in Little Tokyo in LA. Lots of pens, pencils, notebooks, and all sorts of books and manga.
Mobile is about discoverability and money. iOS users are more willing to pay for apps than any other platform, and every established business wants an app so they can be on more devices.
I like simple, and I like to be able to see changes I make in real time. React makes a lot of things more simple, so I use it often.