Personally I like using LLMs for getting information (not chat) or solving problems, and I like the fact it's text and I can read it quicker than a normal conversation, and don't need to look for facial cues when ingesting the information provided (am I autistic?), but I might be a minority...
I like Organic Maps because it isn't full of the social things. Every time I open Google Maps it shows that card at the bottom with "what's popular in your area", full of pictures of people's breakfasts and other nonsense. Organic Maps is free of this noise.
Also, the desktop client on Linux is quite useful.
Alternatives for Windows etc. are Cruiser Maps, a Java application (and also available as an Android app).
All map apps I tested so far were kind of usable but nowhere near Apple or Google maps. Especially for longer trips I often got lost and had to re-navigate by different reasons (voice announcement too late, no lane instructions, etc.).
However, I listed it because it is a "usable" alternative that works offline.
Idk, pedestrian navigation has been pretty decent for me so far. (There’s been one case of it showing a path in Tbilisi that would require me to jump from a 3 m wall, but it was exactly once.) I suppose it depends on which city you’re in and how well mapped it is on the OSM.
Where it’s lacking is POIs – there’s way more stuff on Google Maps, and if I’m looking for some place in particular, I usually go straight to Google, then copy the location over to CoMaps.¹ I then try to add it to OSM when I have the time. Still again, there’s no reviews or photos (in the app; OSM does support photo linking).
Public transit is another problem. It’s usually okay for metro (MRT/LRT/etc), but I wouldn’t trust it with buses just yet.
I used OrganicMaps for navigation from the UK through France, Germany, Switzerland, back into France and then Spain last year on a 2 week enjoyable camper van trip. It can take a while for routing changes if you ignore it and decide to drive elsewhere, and I don't really use the voice alerts (I just have it on my phone on the dashboard via a magnet), but all in all it worked really well.
Although I would like speed limits shown in MPH in the UK, OrganicMaps' KMH limits were useful on the Continent.
Does anybody know of a project that offers public transport routing? Ideally with real time information, but I can live with only using schedules or even just average passage interval.
The other general sticking point for me is the reviews, but I could invite more serendipity to my restaurant search.
Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out for when I am back in central Europe, but I am currently based in south Europe and sadly my country/city are not covered.
FWIW Organic Maps are aware of this issue. In the poll on their mastodon account, lack of public transit information was voted as number one missing feature. As far as I’m aware, they are looking into integrating the public APIs for it wherever possible.
It really has a "login" button that doesn't log in? Does it mean "take the action of going through the door once you have got the key via the connection code man"?
My first direct app is similar. The "Generate a security code" button only appears on the login screen, not after you've logged in. It used to be covered by a pop up. Now when I open the app it auto logs me in with face ID and I have to actively log out to get to it. The code in my case is used to log into their website. The first time I tried I had to phone them and say "eh? how's it work?"
With the lack of polish and attention to detail I see in Tahoe, I for one am really glad I stayed on Sequoia! They need a "Snow Leopard" release - zero new features, hundreds of bug fixes.
I guess it's why they built the new headquarters as a donut shape so that issues can go round and round and round and round forever
It's an (understandable) bummer that the latest phones and iDevices require the latest iOS/macOS. My friend was trying to stay on Sequoia but then couldn't interface with their new AirPods, so they had to upgrade.
wxWidgets has sizers where elements sit inside them and grow/shrink as necessary. Amusingly the macOS version is based on Cocoa, which I presume Finder is also based on...
I am of the same opinion watching them attempt to use modern UIs. When Windows 3.11 was released, it came with a manual that told you how everything worked, and how to interact with it. Windows 95 was also exceptionally logical.
The modern UIs are awful, since buttons sometimes look like links, scrollbars randomly disappear (and their direction for mouse scrolling is opposite to what they were for decades), interaction requires gestures that are not obvious at all, and all of this is even worse on a touchscreen where you are reduced to groping and fumbling around with it - who would know that swiping left or right on a list element means "delete"??
Poor show all round. It is an endemic problem where modern OS manufacturers change interactions every couple of releases, marginally enough to make the object irritating and useless to use.
I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum.
The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days.
I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!
How can C++ not be the "right" language? It seems to meet all the requirements for event-driven GUIs - event handlers are function callbacks after all...
C++ works, but compared to other languages it's often no longer the most productive choice for UI work.
Modern UI code is mostly glue and state management, where fast iteration matters more than squeezing out maximum performance. And when performance does matter, there are also newer, safer languages.
For teams comfortable with C++ or with existing C++ libraries to integrate, it can of course still be a strong choice, just not the preferred one for most current teams.
But desktop C++ isn't difficult or slow to write...
It seems odd to me that the software world has gone in the direction of "quick to write - slow to run". It should be the other way around. Things of quality (eg. paintings by Renaissance masters) took time to create, despite being quick to observe.
It also seems proven that releasing software quickly ("fast iteration") doesn't lead to quality - see how many releases of the YouTube app or Netflix there are on iOS or Android; if speedy releases are important, it is valuing rush to production over quality, much like a processed food version of edible content.
In a world that is also facing energy issues, sluggish and inefficient performance should be shunned, not welcomed?
I suppose this mentality is endemic, and why we see a raft of cruddy slow software these days, where upcoming developers ("current teams") no longer value performance over ease of their job. It can only get worse if the "it's good enough" mentality persists. It's quite sad.
The part that takes time in UI isn’t wiring up components, it’s the small changes like something is a pixel to the right or that gap is two pixels wide. Changing those in a C++ project means recompiling and that adds up to significant overhead over a day of polishing the UI. If C++ was able to get builds out in less than a second, this wouldn’t be an issue. People value performance in their own tools more than the tools of their customer.
In modern Qt you don't write UI in C++ anymore - you do that in QML. It is far simpler to create amazing pixel perfect UIs with drooling-inducing animations in QML. I wrote a blog post that talks a bit about this[1].
In wxWidgets you use sizers, so you don't work on pixel-level alignments. I can understand if you're using an ancient framework like MFC, but even then I seem to recall there was a sizer equivalent system (or it is easy enough to write a class to do so, moving components).
I think it is a daft thing to move to shipping a colossal web framework and entire browser simply because of 1px UI alignments (which have been a solved problem for decades in C++ anyway).
I don't understand why he thinks all users will use WSL in Windows. I have never ever touched it, and I've developed on Windows for decades (C++/C#/JS/web). It seems like trying to make Windows non-native or some semi-Linux.
I also have never touched Docker on Linux, despite having used that from RedHat 6.0 days (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS now).
Also, he missed out Shotcut as a decent video editor. It recently enabled a 10bit workflow (plus the Frei0r plugins are easy enough to write for it, if you so desire).
I don't understand how it got so bad. On Windows 95 or 98, you knew that pressing Windows > P > across right > N would open Notepad in about 22 milliseconds of interaction. Things just worked and responded.
Personally I like using LLMs for getting information (not chat) or solving problems, and I like the fact it's text and I can read it quicker than a normal conversation, and don't need to look for facial cues when ingesting the information provided (am I autistic?), but I might be a minority...
Some people might really find this useful.
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