The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.
There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.
So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)
25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.
Hey I'm curious on how your reminder app works and to what effects, if you're willing to share. I'm on iteration 3 already of my reminder app, also vibe coded, and it helps me a lot. My first one was inspired on Remind [0].
I get that effect while walking, but also from multi-hour highway (not local) driving when the road isn't crowded. Somehow, having my body do something that takes only a slight amount of continuous awareness, but not zero, seems to enable me to escape mental ruts more easily. For me, it allows for deeper concentration in the creative realm than I can have while sitting.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."
David Gelernter describes a theory of consciousness and creativity that explains why this works in his book “The Muse in the Machine”. I recommend it to everyone.
This goes back a LONG way for me. I really enjoyed his Notes From The Field column in InfoWorld, which was both reliably funny and reliably interesting, from around 1987-1995.
The software isn't so good these days, even while the hardware has been the best in the world. Now that the guy responsible for the hardware will be CEO, maybe quality will come back to software too.
I wrote a lot of APL for my undergraduate Senior Project in 1978/1979.
I really enjoyed it because it was fun. You could do an incredible amount of work in a single line of code.
The only problem was, that line would then be almost impossible to read and understand! It could easily be used as a "write-only" language even without a separate obfuscation step.
When I become a professional programmer right after college, I never used it again, and learned to write code that was readable above all else.
Is this an instance of the maxim that one has to be twice as smart to debug code as to write it?
Are you aware of any APL programs written using Literate Programming?
Apparently there was at least one attempt:
Lee J. Dickey. Literate programming in APL and APLWEB. APL
Quote Quad, 23(4):11–??, June 1, 1993. CODEN APLQD9. ISSN 0163-6006.
Perhaps that additional layer of documentation would help? (APL is a language I've always been fascinated by, but never had occasion to more than superficially examine)
Im running APL only stickers on my keyboard because it seemed more entertaining than blank caps for touch typing. Freaks people out, but really enjoy it.
"If you delete your account, we will delete your data within 30 days, except we may retain a limited set of data for longer where required or permitted by law."
"where required".... hmm, that seems OK. We don't want to violate the law!
"or permitted".... er...
[I wonder why this comment is being voted down. Do people here think it's NOT OK to comply with the law with respect to retaining data? Or is the reason somehow the opposite of that? Not sure. But my point was that the "where required" clause seems moot if they are going to retain data where "permitted", which in my book, is NOT OK.]
I'm 70. Most of my high school and college friends are on Facebook, and some other friends. So I use it (including its Messenger component) a lot to keep in touch! I know it's a generational thing. Just thought I'd mention it.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
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