Author: mdhughes

Press X to Review

Picked up Life is Strange freebie episode on Steam. Super aggravating controls: Almost no control over the camera, even less over the cursor: Find the off-target mouse circle, drag slowly to a command. Running is not always available, let alone default as it should be for playability. Most cutscenes can't be skipped. I don't know if I'd like the story or the game, because the first few areas drove me insane.

I've played and enjoyed a lot of walking simulators, like Proteus, Dear Esther, Gone Home (had to massively increase mouse sensitivity), and Connor Sherlock's games. These mostly use standard FPS WASD controls, mouse crosshair, and E to use.

And a lot of story games, like David Cage's Heavy Rain & Beyond Two Souls. Cage's games make heavy use of dual-stick controllers and "mash X now!" quick-time events, have minimal free will to go off the rails, but they aren't frustrating to play.

And physics toys, like Garry's Mod and Goat Simulator. These have dead standard FPS controls and total player freedom.

LiS is the first game in a long time I can't progress in.

Bring Out the Type System

By the way, about void-safety: for a decade now, Eiffel has been void-safe, meaning a compile-time guarantee of no run-time null pointer dereferencing. It is beyond my understanding how the rest of the world can still live with programs that run under myriad swords of Damocles: x.op (…) calls that might any minute, without any warning or precedent, hit a null x and crash.
—Bertrand Meyer, Why not program right?

I knew this would be exasperating, but really now. At this point, my eyes rolled completely out of my head and I no longer have eyes. ?

References don't just randomly become null without warning. You chose to call a function that might return null, and didn't bother to put in an if or assert when that's a possibility. Typically the exception system catches it if you do miss it.

The Objective-C model of nil messaging just returning nil or 0 was theoretically dangerous, but in practice incredibly useful. Crashing out in Javascript means I have to wrap everything with (x ? x.op() : null) to get the same effect, which might require a lot of temp vars.

Do type devotees actually believe in randomly-appearing errors, or that dynamic programmers just flail our limbs on a keyboard until something manages to pass tests, or do they just exaggerate a rare edge case they saw once, or are they completely fabricating this stuff to justify their waste of time/perversion?

Type systems are self-inflicted BDSM, and it is not self-evident that everyone wants to wear a gimp suit.

Talking on the Internet

Or—more likely—a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy’s system into Hiro’s computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn’t touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.
And it doesn’t make sense anyway. “That’s a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug,” Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.
“It is,” the guy says. “Try it.”
“Does it fuck up your brain?” Hiro says. “Or your computer?”
“Both. Neither. What’s the difference?”
Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun.
—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, ch. 5

Not always, but sometimes.

Minimally Competent Linux Apps

Yesterday's question and the Linux user response bugs me:

"because they are writing actually useful software, and not bells-and-frippery bullshit."
@dgold

That's just a horrific anti-user attitude. I want nothing but suffering for the developers & maintainers of Linux, but the poor bastards using it are still people, and people deserve software that doesn't suck.

So I duckduckwent for some clickbait and picked out some non-system apps.

Sources:

I'm going to mark these X for Cross-Platform, L for Linux-only, or NL for Not on Linux, and a completely biased first impression (unless I've used it) star rating:

  • X ★★★☆☆: VLC Media Player: Generally quite awful but it works, sometimes the only thing that does on random torrented videos.
  • X ★★★☆☆: Firefox: Meh. The Meh of browsers, leftover squeezings from the corpse of Netscape/Mozilla. The old rendering engine was good, but then the web moved on, and the new engine struggles to keep up. But not unusable.
  • X ★☆☆☆☆: GIMP: Now you're just being mean, Techradar. Nobody deserves to be GIMPed, and it may be against the Geneva Conventions.
  • X ★★☆☆☆: Deluge actually looks kind of decent for a generic torrent client. Hate those stock GNOME(?) toolbar icons.
  • X ★★☆☆☆: Thunderbird: Oh, I remember that. I briefly used it between mutt on BSD, and Apple Mail once I trusted the Mac. I'm sure it's as annoying to use as ever, but it works.
  • X ★☆☆☆☆: LibreOffice: "Because libre is free, man" (tokes). Sure, it barely opens Office documents and often corrupts them, and its feature set is spartan to nonexistent, and it looks like ass, but… uh… I guess it's all you got on Linux? Microsoft Office now runs on Mac, iOS, and Android, so maybe you could run the Android Office instead?
  • X ★★★☆☆: Pidgin: I think this is developed first on Windows, and then they also have a Gtk+ port that runs on Mac & Linux. There's just kind of an antiseptic, joyless smell to Windows software even with a filthy pigeon mascot.
  • X ★★☆☆☆: Audacity: Hideously ugly, impossibly awkward, but often the only audio editor that solves quick editing of multi-track WAVs. I loathe Audacity but use it a couple times a week.
  • X ★★★★☆: Chrome: Competent Google behemoth browser, if there was no Safari I guess I'd use Chrome. Instead it's my Flash-running trash silo.
  • X ☆☆☆☆☆: Copay: I don't consider Ponzi scams legitimate software. How do intelligent people fall for this shit?
  • X ★☆☆☆☆: Fucking Skype: Fucking Skype, can you hear me? Can… Can you hear me calling? Shit everyone hang up and call back in. No, now you sound like a robot, too. FUCKING SKYPE.
  • L ★★☆☆☆: Corebird: No shit, a Linux-only, Gtk+ Twitter client. Supposedly full-featured, at least until Twitter shuts off the API. I hate the big buttons and the weird padding and text boxes that don't fill all horizontal space, it's simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic, which is amazebad. Icon is a bird with its brain exposed like Hannibal Lector is about to scoop it out. I… This is a work of comedy genius, or insanity. But kudos, Linux guys, on your first app.
  • L ★★★☆☆: Evince: Like Preview on Mac, a thing you don't realize is even software. Which is about as high praise as you're gonna get.
  • X ★★☆☆☆: Clementine: I've tried this on the Mac during one of my fits of temper at iTunes. It's functional but not as nice as iTunes (!!!), but for Linux I'm sure it's intolerable since they can't play music without it stuttering or being interrupted, because Linus is an incompetent bozo who doesn't realize real-time audio matters. Also hasn't had an official release or news in 2 years, tho the github repo shows more recent activity. Have fun compiling and running from HEAD!
  • NL: Dropbox: Linuxhint tells people to use Dropbox website despite having no Linux app. That may be the saddest thing I've seen all day, and I just watched a TV show where a man saw two of his sons shot dead, and then he was shot dead and his other son is in prison now. This is the weeping song
  • L ★★★★☆: Cumulus QT: Real-time weather in a nice UI. No web site, just a github repo, but seriously, the first good thing I've seen in this entire mess.
  • X ★★★★★: Krita: A cross-platform but really excellent paint program, somewhat in the style of Fractal Design Painter or any of those. I wasn't even aware it ran on Linux, it's been around in the Mac & Windows world for a while. Doesn't really replace Photoshop/GIMP/Acorn/GraphicConverter for pixel-fucking, but for painting on the computer it's quite good.
  • X ★★☆☆☆: OpenShot: Video editor, awful generic UI and more GNOME icons, and I've heard it described as slower than paint drying, but not my kind of thing to even evaluate.

So that was a parade of mostly the shittiest cross-platform apps ever, that I wouldn't allow on my computer. A couple are respectable. It looks like Cumulus and maybe some GNOME people are the only decent desktop devs on Linux? There are good cross-platform apps not listed, so I suspect "Linux users have no aesthetic sense" is a big part of this, no recognition for even trying.

I'm not going to attempt this for Windows, ain't enough whiskey in the world for that.

Non-Apple Development: Does It Exist?

By no means the first time I've seen this sentiment:

Still interesting to see people talking passionately about the Open Web and how bad silos are (which is good)
whilst simultaneously linking only to Apple things and app-locked things in general; the web is still here and
it damned sure isn’t exclusive to Apple and your phone.
@simonwoods

The thing is, Android, Linux, & Windows devs don't step up and produce good apps or attractive web sites, so what else would anyone link to?

I presume most of the non-Microsoft-employed Windows devs are in enterprise, doing something awful with SAP or Excel or Outlook; I'm not really familiar with their universe, but they certainly don't make a lot of nice end-user software, and they don't hang out on any obvious nerd sites. Are they ashamed to admit what they do? Do they not have Internet access? That 95% of the desktop computer market has a nearly invisible developer population is weird. There's some Windows game bros, eating C++ bugs and mostly being dicks to everyone, but they're not making end-user software (Coming soon: Call of Duty: Mind Mapping Edition!)

Linux devs do sometimes make end-user software, but it's unspeakably awful, like GIMP. Server-side, sure, there's plenty of systems, though I think not many people live and develop on it. My bias is admitted: I loathe Linux as though I were Edmond Dantès himself and Linux had imprisoned me (which in effect it did), and I have sworn eternal vengeance. But my impression is that most server software devs work on Macs, or rarely Windows, and use git or Docker uploads to get everything on Linux.

Android software is almost always made after a web or iOS prototype, and generally as an afterthought; nobody makes Android-first apps except basic system utilities like wallpaper-changers.

There is web-first stuff, including now cross-platform web tech, which could in theory be built on Linux or Windows; yet it seems that most end-user web devs making anything nice are, again, Mac users. If you have any aesthetic sense at all, if you want a nice UNIX environment but don't just work in emacs, it's the least terrible option.

There's an old joke,

"Never ask someone if they use a Mac. If they don't, don't embarrass them; if they do, they'll tell you."

This might be more true than it seems, maybe Mac nerds just talk about it constantly? But why don't others?

If you make end-user software for other platforms, I'd like to hear how, and why, and why it's so invisible?

Apple Music Feedback

Just sent in the following feedback, feel free to copy & send this, too:

Currently for songs and albums, you can mark them as "Disliked", but you can't mark an entire artist as Blocked, only Follow.

I want to extinguish ThWknd, Drake, and a bunch of other terrible "artists" from existence, never see them in my For You page, never be recommended them in any page.

Ideally once I Block an artist, they wouldn't even show up in searches or in your curated playlists.