I think the 4 was really where it took off. It’s remembered for the antenna PR mess, but it was the first mix of speed and features that made me and many many colleagues say “this could be better than my BlackBerry.” And it was!
I want to speak up for OS X. When it came out, and for years afterward, it hit an amazing sweet spot of looks cool, runs browsers well, runs MS well, runs Adobe well, full Unix shell, added great new features every year. There is a reason it became extremely popular with web devs, as the web was taking over the economy.
A closed local firewall blocking all inbound by default. Spotlight indexing. Time Machine backups. Flexible screenshot tools. Print anything to PDF. Lots of useful trackpad gestures. And after Intel, we got Rosetta, Boot Camp, easy Windows virtualization like Parallels, etc. That’s all off the top of my head, but for sure OS X had Microsoft on their back foot for years. Gates used to yell at his team about it.
I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.
There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.
Maybe that would encourage writers to actually make best use of the book medium as opposed to Andy Weir which is basically a film script with a cover on it.
> made the movie of Project Hail Mary without paying one dime to Andy Weir.
and is there anything really wrong with that?
I personally would have liked to see fan made movies of various IPs like star wars, and harry potter, but it is impossible due to the long reach of copyright infringement.
Commercial image providers can delay their images. See for example https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260310-us-satellite-...: “American firm Planet Labs PBC on Tuesday said it now imposes a two-week delay for access to its satellite images of the Middle East because of the US-Israeli war against Iran.”
“BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities.
[…]
Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense
[…]
Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
I phrased that badly, what I meant is two things in one and I mashed them together:
- do you think nation-states have the same commercial relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your private messages to specific governments because they won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.
- do you think nation-states that are your opponents would be getting their services from commercial image providers that are loyal to you? The American companies you list are far from the only ones on the planet that provide satellite imagery as a service.
Harvard’s signal is how hard it is to get in. There are less prestigious universities with a higher sticker price. Bad example, but I agree with your point in general.
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
Amplified but redundant for HN crowd is my point. I’m not clueless as to why a person who blogs to maintain attention would amplify a topic. Your explanation was not needed.
The three finger drag pattern comes from Fingerworks, the multitouch trackpad company that Apple bought to get their multitouch tech.
A Fingerworks trackpad is when I switched away from a mouse, and in some ways it was even better than a modern Apple trackpad. First it was huge, maybe like twice the area of a MacBook Pro trackpad. It had no click switch at all. Taps only, which were very reliable.
It also lay flat on the desk and was only a few mm thick. So it felt like just resting your hand on the desk. And it was possible to just passively rest your hand on it with no reaction. So using it, my hand and wrist were totally relaxed when not moving the cursor (most of the time). Whereas with modern Apple trackpads, I sometimes get spurious inputs when resting my hand on it.
It also had tons of gestures that were mapped to keyboard shortcuts. So an “opening the jar” arcing motion with 4 fingers opened whatever file was currently highlighted. And “closing the jar” closed the current window. Etc.
They are the basis of the prototype that Bas Ording used to design all the interactions we know today on touch: inertial scrolling with rubber band effect, row of icons for apps, pinch to zoom, etc. It was a fingerwork trackpad with his Director (in 2004!) interactions projected on! It was designed for a Mac tablet, but then the focus shifted to a phone.
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