This video linked from the site is quite good at adding a sense of scale to the undertaking. I also love that Roman will be supported by Hubble and Webb.
I've been waiting for several days on my MacOS app review. After many successful releases, somebody has decided to nitpick the App description. Fixed and resubmitted. Then, another rejection for some other related aspect of the description. Fixed and resubmitted, now waiting on next review.
I'm good to make the description complaint, of course, but it seems the reviewer immediately halts as soon as they encounter any issue. Would have been nice to get both feedback points on the first response, especially given how long it can take to get back to the top of the queue.
At the end of the day, I regret my choice to use the App Store at all.
I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic movies and other odd-ball tapes. During my time, there was a fair bit of the 'helpful advice' this article focuses on, but I think the bigger loss is due to licensing.
At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could.
The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors.
Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream.
There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media.
I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.
This is a bit of an idiosyncratic list. Two of my favorite additions from my own youth: Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow and Batman: Digital Justice. The latter now reads like a bit of a corny cash grab for the early '90s cyber fad, but I still love the time capsule of some if its art.
It took me twice as long to read Hard Boiled as it should since I spent so much time looking at Geof Darrow’s intricately detailed art. Great story, but the illustrations are on another level.
It's not that idiosyncratic a list, those were the first two graphic novels that came to my mind when opening up the website. Geoff Darrow's art Hardboiled is incredible. I was a huge batman fan as a young teen and digital justice came out at peak Batman hype, and it was much hyped itself, but it wasn't very good.
Please read the fine print before use. The steak knives are not to be used with animal products and poster will not be responsible in case of cracked blade.
A while back I had to install a bluetooth mouse on a Mac mini with out existing mouse attached. It was a nightmare only reserved after lots of searching on my phone to enable the accessibility mode setting allowing arrow-based mouse movement.
The System Settings app seemed so incredibly hostile to keyboard navigation. I was able to start it, but tab only moves you in and out of the search window. From there, you can search for Bluetooth, but there seems no way to move from the left-hand menu tab the main contents. Within the main window, there are no buttons unless you hover with... a mouse, and no way to traverse the list via keyboard.
It'd be great to bring back some basic standards for how tab and arrow keys should aid in situations like this. I don't need them all the time, but they'd have saved me a real headache had they been there then.
Thing is, Apple has no standards for keyboard navigation of native UIs to bring back, except if you turn on the accessibility feature I think called “Full Keyboard Access” which is supposed to let you tab to any control instead of only text fields.
The Mac once had zero ability to navigate a dialog without a mouse, other than Enter/Return to do the default button, and Cmd-period (later ESC once it appeared) for cancel). The original Mac also famously had no arrow keys because they were worried developers, if given arrows, would build (or port over) apps that were keyboard-first or which underused the mouse, and they needed the mouse to be a first-class citizen to make the platform truly differentiated.
Windows by contrast started out mouse-optional, so it never lost the keyboard functionality - it’s deeply rooted in the interface’s DNA.
Navigable by keyboard by default? In Windows you hold down Alt and letters start being underlined so you can use the menus. On a Mac, assuming I haven't turned on any a11y features, how do I open and peruse the menus or, just as importantly in the modern era, navigate the random buttons every app has strewn around the top part of windows where the title bar used to be? e.g. in Messages there's a "New chat" button, a "Video Camera" button, and an "(i)" button in that top bar. Some might have direct keyboard shortcuts a user could have memorized like ⌘-N for New, but that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking how you navigate the UI widgets themselves.
Also, dialogs? Open TextEdit. Hit ⌘-O for Open. Hit Tab. For me, default settings, that focuses the Search field. It doesn't visibly move the focus to any other control. After screwing with it for a while, it seems like if you hit Tab two times, nothing appears focused, but then if you use Up/Down arrows at that point, they are now able to select items on the sidebar, then another Tab moves focus to the main file browser, and from there the Search again, and now focus cycles between those three. But there's still no way to access any of the widgets up top. So, it's half-assed and undiscoverable.
The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.
This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDwemQH2zDU
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