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.
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.
I had many of those fun extensions, I think my favorite was one that added physics to your desktop icons so they’d hang from your cursor at an angle if you dragged them from a point other than their “center of gravity”. Sometimes I’d just twiddle icons while thinking through things I was working on.
I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
The Grouch was great. Or "great" if there were little kids around, intermittent fun reward for throwing file in the trash, what could possibly go wrong?
> I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Agreed completely but every now and then it still pops up. Recently, Notchmeister [0]
> 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.
What's so strange about this is that, as that playfulness has been lost, the software has, in many ways, moved in a direction that feels more childishly cartoonish. It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly (even when it perhaps ought to be more serious or economical), which has, ironically, stripped all the charm out of the experience by inundating us with bright colors and childsafe corners.
Small, unexpected, thoughtful moments and Easter eggs like those described in this thread are like a small piece of chocolate after a healthy meal. What we have in most software now (Apple is by no means the only company guilty of this) is more like a diet comprised entirely of candy.
> It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly
The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances.
Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displays today, but tons of software makes you decipher abstract line icons to work out what it can actually do.
The Mac thankfully still has the escape hatch of the menu bar, which almost universally allows you to browse and search all performable actions (and see their keyboard shortcuts inline!), but mobile operating systems don’t even have a touch-centric equivalent of tooltips.
Luckily, considering they brought the menubar to iOS (you can open it on most apps if you have an external keyboard connected and hold CMD), I'd say that Apple is at least somewhat committed to it!
Can you imagine if they changed it so that you had to get those actions by doing a 5 finger swipe while hovering over an app (on the trackpad) or clicking 3 times while moving diagonally across?
Ugh I hate gestures. Such a stupid stupid non-intuitive stupid practice.
There was a very early (1985-6?) app called "Selectric." When you ran it, it immediately exited, leaving you wondering what the point was. Until the next time you started typing: every key you typed made a "Chunk!" sound, the spacebar went "-diggit-", and the return key went "zzzzz...DING." Way fun.
OSX was also easy to modify and add extensions to for many years, as Objective-C is so extremely dynamic... until Apple started really trying to lock things down on purpose, turning macOS more and more into the miserably rigid iOS.
Given how much grief I’ve had from corporate mandated “enterprise” virus and firewall programs, I’m happy they started locking things down. Poorly written kexts were one of the worst user experiences I’ve had to deal with. When your computer crashes because you plug in a USB network adapter (due to a buggy firewall), you’ll want a more stable and locked down system too.
(Oh, and all USB-C/Thunderbolt docking stations have these adapters)
Sadly, there’s a reason why we can’t have nice things…
I never had a Mac in the 90s/early 2000s, but a lot of this still sounds pretty familiar as a passionate Palm OS user at the time:
No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way.
As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!
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
I as well miss that playfulness of that era. We use these things all day, why shouldn't they give us a smile from time to time from something that happens.
I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.
I don't entirely disagree, but I think it is worth noting that there was still quite a bit of playfulness in the UX even in the transition to O SX. There are tons of animation and icon secrets as detailed here: http://mewbies.com/easter_eggs_and_then_some.htm#macx
Further, using traffic lights for window control icons, the magnification effect in the dock, inclusions of the genie and suck window minimize animations, the iTunes visualizer, (still present in Music.app) the cartoon "poof" animation whenever toolbar icons are dragged out and removed...these are all fun features and secrets that are new or at least persisted into the transition to OS X (not to mention the FreeBSD cal and emacs easter eggs). Some were lost when OS X 10.10 released, or when macOS 11 released, but now here with inclusions like Clarus, I think it is obvious that this culture of fun is not lost.
Sadly no amount of UI levity can excuse all the ways modern macOS phones home and violates my privacy. I'd rather have a boring OS that doesn't need remote permission to let me run unknown applications, one preferably made by a company that haven't publicly stated their desire to scan my devices for distasteful/illegal personal data.
I'm afraid to ask, but why are people anti ubiquity? I freaking love my udm-pro and am waiting for their cams to come back in stock so I can ditch my nests.
I saw your exact question elsewhere, so I'll reply with my exact same answer:
I personally grew a strong distaste for several reasons. When I first started my homelab I was ready to go all in with Ubiquiti. Equipment looked nice, great looking UIs, great price. Seemed like everything was perfect for the prosumer. I bought some access points and a UDM pro to start, with plans for some POE switches next. First thing that irked me was that I had to log into everything through the cloud. And it wasn't possible to set up the UDM and access points at the time without a cloud account, though I know this has since changed. Second was that they were sending all kinds of telemetry to HQ. One of the reasons I set up a homelab is for privacy and data sovereignty, so having my low level network equipment spy on me is a huge no-go. The third thing that really pissed me off is that there was no way to manage any clients on my network that didn't go through a Ubiquiti access point. I had an old Airport Pro that I was using and all the clients that connected through it were not visible to the UDM pro. Both official support and the reddit forums said it wasn't possible and it didn't make sense anyway, and gaslit me and even removed some of my posts and comments. What is the point of a firewall if you can't disable traffic to some clients (e.g. I didn't want my robot vacuum phoning home to china). I SSH'd into the UDM and indeed see the vacuum in the ARP table so there was no technical reason to not allow me to set firewall rules for it in the UI. I mean the UDM gave these clients DHCP addresses, so it's obvious that the UDM was aware of them. It became clear - it's a business lock-in strategy to force you to go all-in on Ubiquiti equipment. They don't support heterogeneous mixed-vendor networks. I said fuck that and returned it all. Switched to open source products like OPNSense and used professional equipment from EBay and couldn't be happier. Way more control for the same price, no spying, and no vendor lock-in.
Forcing users to use a cloud account and an app for setup, and enabling telemetry without disclosing it to users, although once they were called out on it by folks noticing a bunch of traffic to their servers they eventually confirmed it was happening and added an opt-out option (see https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/07/ubiquiti_networks_pho...), also there was something about NVR and not being allowed to self host it, or use old hardware... I never bothered to really look into that one, but it seemed to come up a lot.
Stupid bugs caused me to move away from them, conveniently only days before the breach became public.
Bug #1 was when they stopped supporting 32-character SSIDs, so my main network called "Smart Meter Surveillance Network" suddenly was no longer editable. Switching routing platforms is easier than setting up all my devices again.
Bug #2 was the one I wrote up here on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/UNIFI/comments/ghs4bg/arp_for_clien...), which was where ARPing for a client on a meshed wireless AP, from the wired network, would fail. If the client was on a non-meshed AP, it worked.
I expect better from my network, so I dumped Unifi and went to OPNsense on a fanless PC.
- Synology DS1019+ for storage, Plex, and Pi-hole via Docker
- 2x Rucuks R610 APs running Unleashed firware (off-lease eBay purchases, enterprise grade APs, about $150/ea, both wired/non-mesh)
- Brocade ICX6430-C12 Switch (4x 802.11at PoE, handles the APs, another eBay special, cost around $90)
This is working well for me, and unlike the UniFi stuff I can now pretty easily swap out any piece of it with another brand of the same function and things will be fine. The single ecosystem of Unifi always bothered me a bit.
If I want a new VLAN (or special WLAN) it's a little harder than on UniFi, but it's really just setting it up on OPNsense, defining it on the requisite ports on the switch, and turning up the new SSID (if needed).
I also don't miss Unifi's single pane of glass view either. All the shiny threat stuff isn't particularly actionable, and there's a bunch of gaps (IIRC like how it'd wouldn't have usable timestamps for some things) so I was never able to use it to make decisions.
I run the Synology with a LACP link; that's plenty fast as its more a storage/backup box than anything that needs to be performant. Speeding all that up would just be a matter of replacing the switch and adding a card into the Synology, but I don't need that for now. (I'd probably get a new NAS before that.)
• lies about supporting older versions of APs, telling me I need to upgrade to get x-such-feature, and then they support it later on the older hardware.
• Various features sold as _coming_soon_, that really take several years to come about.
• making more and more of their setup require a total buy-in of the whole infrastructure when I only wanted one piece of it.
• It just wan't very reliable. I'd have to reboot all the APs every now and then to get them communicating well again (this seems to be limited to myself and not my friends, but happened on two generations of the UBNT hardware)
But what did them in on the end for me was some version upgrade totally blew up my network, that does depends on different SSIDs mapping to different VLANs, but after the upgrade, they bridged everything together.
Found that unacceptable, so I gave up fighting them, dropped in another enterprise vendor, and now things are truely rock solid.
Yes, they give out many enterprise features for a very low cost, and the feature set does far surpass any of the consumer price range gear that they hover their price points around.
OOTH, since I do work with lots of Enterprise gear, I know when used gear is falling off in price to affordable for home levels, and how much more life I can reasonably get from it. Sure, I don't have 802.11ax, but I don't think my last round of UBNT AP buys can upgrade to 802.11ax either, would have had to buy another round of UBNT gear.
"On Wednesday, a former Ubiquiti developer was arrested and charged with stealing data and trying to extort his employer while pretending to be a whistleblower.
"Federal prosecutors say Nickolas Sharp, a senior developer at Ubiquiti, actually caused the “breach” that forced Ubiquiti to disclose a cybersecurity incident in January."
No matter how good your security is, a rogue employee with high-level access will always be a threat. Since they now have experience with this situation, I trust that Ubiquiti has dedicated more resources to preventing both employee sabotage and external breaches.
This also shows that not every breach is what it seems, and investigating fully before publicly disclosing can sometimes help prevent disinformation. The “whistleblower” in this case was intentionally lying, and every customer that dedicated time to mitigation had to pay part of the cost.
Yeah, reminiscent of the (apocryphal?) story of the stuntplane mechanic whose negligence almost cost the pilot his life; assuming he'd be fired, the mechanic was shocked when the pilot said he was now the only mechanic allowed to touch his plane, bc he knew, with certainty, there'd never be another such mishap.
I had six unifi protect cameras for over a year until I replaced them all. Rain at night means motion notifications every 30 seconds, bugs at night, same thing. Unifi cameras are terrible for outdoor applications.
Lol, did you use this for something practical and useful? I remember it being kind of mind blowing tech wise at the time, but past that I can’t remember getting a ton of use out of it? Remind me of the highlights?
