Yes, certain elements are kind of a pain in the ass on the Mac. But the Mac hasn't been the best platform to run CS apps on in years. Windows is. Hell, Photoshop runs better in Windows than it does in OS X *on identical hardware.*
Since the 90s, to maintain an Apple product, Adobe has had to: Port from 68k to PPC, then from Classic MacOS to OS X (Photoshop 7 SUCKED on the Mac, but it ran in both operating systems), then they had to adapt from OS X PPC to OS X Intel. Apple jerks their developers around constantly, while Windows just isn't the same kind of moving target.
While I'm sure you'd love it if Adobe conformed completely to Apple guidelines and played nicely with comparatively recent (I know 10.7 is "old" but the move to Intel is older than that) features that have no Windows equivalent, keep in mind that the more hassle the Apple market is to develop for, the less likely they are to develop for it. Remember when they stopped releasing Premiere for the Mac for awhile because it couldn't compete with Final Cut Pro?
I still use Photoshop on a Mac but only occasionally - I've moved my entire toolchain to Windows, and while it sucks in some ways the Mac experience doesn't I've gotten used to it. I'm looking at expanding my line art production software, as there's a few options in that space, but for graphical heavy lift Adobe has effectively cornered the market.
Importantly, I've been using it since 1997 - any alternative has to be featureful and intuitive, and it's competing with 20+ years of muscle memory and needs to be able to correctly read ~15 years of files.
I use an old G4 keyboard on my Windows box. While transitioning from one to the other for graphics work I just could not adapt to the lefthand meta key layout - on the Mac it's control alt command space, with most meta commands using command, then command + alt, with the control key used infrequently. On windows it's control, then control + alt, and the Windows key is a hazard to navigation. On a PC keyboard I hit the damned thing incessantly; it was much easier to train myself to skip over it with a Mac keyboard.
I used one of the slimline laptop-keyboard-with-a-number-pad models until it finally wore out recently, and after having a good long eyeroll at the ridiculous markup they've succumbed to in the last decade, I dug a G4 board out of storage. It gets the job done.
Downloading multi-gig patches that contain nothing but BR skins and StW bugs sucks ass when 99.95% of your game time is spent in StW.
I went back to Guild Wars 2, a game with actively maintained PVE that doesn't get worse with every update (technically speaking; there are those who'd complain about class balance and modifiers but after Fortnite, "the visual effects for my abilities actually draw" and "the community isn't constantly scamming me while waiting for me to do their quests for them" are HUGE plusses).
Got onboarded by friends a few months ago; spent a couple of months lovehating the PVE, and it'll probably be uninstalled whenever I need hard drive space. The in-game community is terrible, there are some deep design flaws, and while I was playing PVE continued to get buggier and more aggravating while every patch contained a huge list of fixes and skins for Battle Royale (PVP) with next to nothing for Save the World (PVE). BR got next day fixes for critical issues while key StW class abilities had been broken for weeks when I left.
The only good thing I can say about BR is you die too quickly to tilt, which is more than I can say for Overwatch. Cosmetics seem to be the big draw, and while I can enjoy that content in some games, in Fortnite they have no attraction for me at all.
If you're willing to wait you can get just about any game for next to nothing. Considering most modern games either come with perpetual updates or a lengthy update/patch/DLC cycle, patience is a great way to get more bang for your entertainment buck.
I tried for awhile around ten years ago. It's a good idea in theory but in practice the vast majority of the feeds I bookmarked were entirely content-free, boiling down to "THIS WEBSITE UPDATED. CLICK HERE FOR CONTENT."
And hell, I can get that without a feed reader, just by checking bookmarks.
My webcomic has an RSS feed and it gets clobbered daily by automated traffic, so it's still in use - though I doubt very much that many, if any, humans even notice or care.
People have been demanding "a la carte" cable for decades.
Well, we finally got it - you can buy all the individual channels you want. Thing is, each one is now its own individual streaming service, with its own account and billing and app interface and media catalog.
Give it another five to ten years and there'll be services that bundle these services for you, and then we can start complaining about how Cable 2.0 is charging us too much for packages we don't use when all we want is Hulu and Netflix.
I just shifted to following a handful of artists on social media - the general trend of webcomic update notifications integrates seamlessly into the rest of my twitter feed, and it seems to be easier to interface with some creators, at least casually.
I dimly recall seeing ads in RSS feeds back in the day but that may have only been on one or two sites. Fact is, while RSS is great for the consumers of information it's not nearly as useful for content creators, at least where monetization is involved.
I tried RSS back in the late aughts - problem was, nearly everything I read at the time was a webcomic, and their RSS feeds amounted to little more than update notifications. Full syndication was rare then, I can't imagine how rare it is now.
Do I use RSS? No. But the feed on my webcomic has gotten over 8,000 hits since I added a redirect from the old feed location a few weeks ago, so it's definitely still in use.
I don't have this problem at all on the desktop. On my phone, on the other hand, it happens with every single website on the commercial web. The damned things spend more time loading than they do displaying content, and it seems like pages are constantly refreshing, only to add nag-boxes for some mobile app I don't want, then to bug me to "subscribe." etc. End result is I don't feel compelled to upgrade my phone, I just don't use the web on it anymore. I can't, it's crap.
The biggest problems I've had with G+ are the fact that it loads on marginal connections whereas facebook just appears, and the fact that it already has access to my gmail contacts without asking. There's a thick wall with razor wire and armed guards on top between work and the rest of my life and I react badly to anything that doesn't perceive or respect that boundary.
Though G+ is less annoying than LinkedIn...
Re:If its as good as FO3/FNV I am so there
on
Fallout 4 Announced
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· Score: 1
If F4 is moddable (and there's no sane reason for it not to be) then many launch issues will be sorted by the community within a year. As good as F3/FNV were it took fan support and fan-made patches to make them stable, let alone playable, on modern systems.
If you have F3: GOTY and have all DLC for New Vegas, you might want to give this a try at some point: Tale of Two Wastelands merges F3 into FNV and gives you an F3 start, the FNV rules, and access to everything in both wastelands. I added a TTW developer-supplied mod to slow down experience gain and after 120+ hours I still have plenty to do and I'm level 46 (FNV level cap) - using FNV mods like NVAC, Project Nevada, etc.
As a creative type who's done the research and who's intentionally let military history and physics inform (and "correct") their storytelling and vehicle design, you do not speak for all of us.
Though that is speaking as a writer. Speaking as an artist, sometimes the function winds up being deduced from the design as opposed to the other way around.
Depending on the design and just how serious you are about keeping it around you could convert it to a static site. You don't have to worry about wordpress or plugin updates if there's no CMS on the server.
That said, I have a number of sites that get next to no traffic and probably the biggest issue with maintaining a WP install these days is theme and plugin updates. Trim those down, strip out comments (or move the "responsibility" for them to something like Disqus), fiddle.htaccess* if you're feeling paranoid, make a backup and let 'er rip. Or rot, as the case may be.
* It's possible to allow only a specific IP to see wp-admin, or no IP at all. The biggest problem with this approach in my experience is forgetting that you've set the condition.
My high school had something like that in the 90s. It was a cheap way to inject advertising into a completely captive audience under the guise of "educational" programming.
Viewing was initially mandatory but early in eleventh grade I unplugged the damned thing so I could study and the response from the teacher and the rest of the class was a mix of acceptance and relief. That year the school was running the thing first and third lunch (lunch being three 30 minute periods) which meant our class got it twice... and we preferred a solid hour of journalism class to 15 minutes paid advertorial 15 minutes of class, repeat.
That was my first attempt to do something about invasive advertising - and it's been an uphill battle ever since!
Why train employees when you hire the exact pre-trained skill set you need? Companies aren't hiring programmers or developers or designers, they're hiring 5+ years javascript, node.js, SASS, ruby on rails,.net, and/or whatever other buzzwords they think they need. Even the most outlandish and demanding job description will get a list of candidates, from which the company can select a proper "culture fit."
Networking matters more than paper qualifications now more than ever before - we're heading for a post-labor world and nobody bothered to inform the workforce.
They don't need to give a crap about how developers feel about the platform - they're printing money and the fanbase will bounce anyone critical of what they're doing.
Seriously; try voicing any sort of well-reasoned logical criticism of the brand - in short order some kool-aid guzzler is going to try like hell to make you feel like your problems with OS X or iOS or Final Cut Pro or QuickTime codecs ("using Apple products for more than five years," basically) are your fault and not Apple's.
If they honestly wanted to add functionality, the Firefox developers could do it in a way that didn't disrupt existing users. Apple did this more or less right with Spaces, Expose, and the Dashboard - I don't use any of them, I never will, and I don't have to to perform the same basic tasks I've been using a Mac for since the 90s. The shortcuts are on the keyboard and in the system preferences but it's difficult to accidentally invoke these things unless you're looking for them. They're unobtrusive.
The frequent buzzwordy trendy chrome-chasing "disruption" designed to draw attention to the changes is one of the reasons I left Firefox - I don't need my browser to "reinvent" itself at random. That happens enough with iTunes, thank you. I need it to get faster, run the add-ons I want, and otherwise not change at all. Firefox isn't really a browser anymore, it's a UX playground with a captive audience that's slowly trickling away to browsers that don't change their core functionality as much, or as often.
Chrome recently tried to push graphical bookmarks on me - an under-handed and unannounced violation of trust that gave me a panic attack. Fortunately the change was easily reverted, but it was a harsh reminder that no browser is safe - developers drunk on kool-aid can and will change whatever they want whenever they want it doesn't matter how strenuously users object or how well-reasoned our arguments are, we're always dismissed as "edge cases" or brushed off with a dismissive "nobody uses a browser that way."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, certain elements are kind of a pain in the ass on the Mac. But the Mac hasn't been the best platform to run CS apps on in years. Windows is. Hell, Photoshop runs better in Windows than it does in OS X *on identical hardware.*
Since the 90s, to maintain an Apple product, Adobe has had to: Port from 68k to PPC, then from Classic MacOS to OS X (Photoshop 7 SUCKED on the Mac, but it ran in both operating systems), then they had to adapt from OS X PPC to OS X Intel. Apple jerks their developers around constantly, while Windows just isn't the same kind of moving target.
While I'm sure you'd love it if Adobe conformed completely to Apple guidelines and played nicely with comparatively recent (I know 10.7 is "old" but the move to Intel is older than that) features that have no Windows equivalent, keep in mind that the more hassle the Apple market is to develop for, the less likely they are to develop for it. Remember when they stopped releasing Premiere for the Mac for awhile because it couldn't compete with Final Cut Pro?
I still use Photoshop on a Mac but only occasionally - I've moved my entire toolchain to Windows, and while it sucks in some ways the Mac experience doesn't I've gotten used to it. I'm looking at expanding my line art production software, as there's a few options in that space, but for graphical heavy lift Adobe has effectively cornered the market.
Importantly, I've been using it since 1997 - any alternative has to be featureful and intuitive, and it's competing with 20+ years of muscle memory and needs to be able to correctly read ~15 years of files.
I use an extension named "ScriptSafe" to give Chrome NoScript-like functionality. The web would be completely unusable without it.
Go back to telling me EXACTLY what you're changing on my system when I install your update and I'll go back to installing them.
Tinfoil hate time: Maybe this is a long-term plan to drive down employee salaries?
My current iPhone has a headphone jack. My next phone, whatever the model, will have one.
I use an old G4 keyboard on my Windows box. While transitioning from one to the other for graphics work I just could not adapt to the lefthand meta key layout - on the Mac it's control alt command space, with most meta commands using command, then command + alt, with the control key used infrequently. On windows it's control, then control + alt, and the Windows key is a hazard to navigation. On a PC keyboard I hit the damned thing incessantly; it was much easier to train myself to skip over it with a Mac keyboard.
I used one of the slimline laptop-keyboard-with-a-number-pad models until it finally wore out recently, and after having a good long eyeroll at the ridiculous markup they've succumbed to in the last decade, I dug a G4 board out of storage. It gets the job done.
Downloading multi-gig patches that contain nothing but BR skins and StW bugs sucks ass when 99.95% of your game time is spent in StW.
I went back to Guild Wars 2, a game with actively maintained PVE that doesn't get worse with every update (technically speaking; there are those who'd complain about class balance and modifiers but after Fortnite, "the visual effects for my abilities actually draw" and "the community isn't constantly scamming me while waiting for me to do their quests for them" are HUGE plusses).
Got onboarded by friends a few months ago; spent a couple of months lovehating the PVE, and it'll probably be uninstalled whenever I need hard drive space. The in-game community is terrible, there are some deep design flaws, and while I was playing PVE continued to get buggier and more aggravating while every patch contained a huge list of fixes and skins for Battle Royale (PVP) with next to nothing for Save the World (PVE). BR got next day fixes for critical issues while key StW class abilities had been broken for weeks when I left.
The only good thing I can say about BR is you die too quickly to tilt, which is more than I can say for Overwatch. Cosmetics seem to be the big draw, and while I can enjoy that content in some games, in Fortnite they have no attraction for me at all.
If you're willing to wait you can get just about any game for next to nothing. Considering most modern games either come with perpetual updates or a lengthy update/patch/DLC cycle, patience is a great way to get more bang for your entertainment buck.
I tried for awhile around ten years ago. It's a good idea in theory but in practice the vast majority of the feeds I bookmarked were entirely content-free, boiling down to "THIS WEBSITE UPDATED. CLICK HERE FOR CONTENT."
And hell, I can get that without a feed reader, just by checking bookmarks.
My webcomic has an RSS feed and it gets clobbered daily by automated traffic, so it's still in use - though I doubt very much that many, if any, humans even notice or care.
People have been demanding "a la carte" cable for decades.
Well, we finally got it - you can buy all the individual channels you want. Thing is, each one is now its own individual streaming service, with its own account and billing and app interface and media catalog.
Give it another five to ten years and there'll be services that bundle these services for you, and then we can start complaining about how Cable 2.0 is charging us too much for packages we don't use when all we want is Hulu and Netflix.
I just shifted to following a handful of artists on social media - the general trend of webcomic update notifications integrates seamlessly into the rest of my twitter feed, and it seems to be easier to interface with some creators, at least casually.
I dimly recall seeing ads in RSS feeds back in the day but that may have only been on one or two sites. Fact is, while RSS is great for the consumers of information it's not nearly as useful for content creators, at least where monetization is involved.
I tried RSS back in the late aughts - problem was, nearly everything I read at the time was a webcomic, and their RSS feeds amounted to little more than update notifications. Full syndication was rare then, I can't imagine how rare it is now.
Do I use RSS? No. But the feed on my webcomic has gotten over 8,000 hits since I added a redirect from the old feed location a few weeks ago, so it's definitely still in use.
I don't have this problem at all on the desktop. On my phone, on the other hand, it happens with every single website on the commercial web. The damned things spend more time loading than they do displaying content, and it seems like pages are constantly refreshing, only to add nag-boxes for some mobile app I don't want, then to bug me to "subscribe." etc. End result is I don't feel compelled to upgrade my phone, I just don't use the web on it anymore. I can't, it's crap.
With Yahoo! looking for a buyer, someone has to pick up the slack.
The biggest problems I've had with G+ are the fact that it loads on marginal connections whereas facebook just appears, and the fact that it already has access to my gmail contacts without asking. There's a thick wall with razor wire and armed guards on top between work and the rest of my life and I react badly to anything that doesn't perceive or respect that boundary.
Though G+ is less annoying than LinkedIn...
If F4 is moddable (and there's no sane reason for it not to be) then many launch issues will be sorted by the community within a year. As good as F3/FNV were it took fan support and fan-made patches to make them stable, let alone playable, on modern systems.
If you have F3: GOTY and have all DLC for New Vegas, you might want to give this a try at some point: Tale of Two Wastelands merges F3 into FNV and gives you an F3 start, the FNV rules, and access to everything in both wastelands. I added a TTW developer-supplied mod to slow down experience gain and after 120+ hours I still have plenty to do and I'm level 46 (FNV level cap) - using FNV mods like NVAC, Project Nevada, etc.
As a creative type who's done the research and who's intentionally let military history and physics inform (and "correct") their storytelling and vehicle design, you do not speak for all of us.
Though that is speaking as a writer. Speaking as an artist, sometimes the function winds up being deduced from the design as opposed to the other way around.
Depending on the design and just how serious you are about keeping it around you could convert it to a static site. You don't have to worry about wordpress or plugin updates if there's no CMS on the server.
That said, I have a number of sites that get next to no traffic and probably the biggest issue with maintaining a WP install these days is theme and plugin updates. Trim those down, strip out comments (or move the "responsibility" for them to something like Disqus), fiddle .htaccess* if you're feeling paranoid, make a backup and let 'er rip. Or rot, as the case may be.
* It's possible to allow only a specific IP to see wp-admin, or no IP at all. The biggest problem with this approach in my experience is forgetting that you've set the condition.
While Starcraft was released in 1998, Quakeworld was released in 1996 - three years before CS.
My high school had something like that in the 90s. It was a cheap way to inject advertising into a completely captive audience under the guise of "educational" programming.
Viewing was initially mandatory but early in eleventh grade I unplugged the damned thing so I could study and the response from the teacher and the rest of the class was a mix of acceptance and relief. That year the school was running the thing first and third lunch (lunch being three 30 minute periods) which meant our class got it twice... and we preferred a solid hour of journalism class to 15 minutes paid advertorial 15 minutes of class, repeat.
That was my first attempt to do something about invasive advertising - and it's been an uphill battle ever since!
Why train employees when you hire the exact pre-trained skill set you need? Companies aren't hiring programmers or developers or designers, they're hiring 5+ years javascript, node.js, SASS, ruby on rails, .net, and/or whatever other buzzwords they think they need. Even the most outlandish and demanding job description will get a list of candidates, from which the company can select a proper "culture fit."
Networking matters more than paper qualifications now more than ever before - we're heading for a post-labor world and nobody bothered to inform the workforce.
They don't need to give a crap about how developers feel about the platform - they're printing money and the fanbase will bounce anyone critical of what they're doing.
Seriously; try voicing any sort of well-reasoned logical criticism of the brand - in short order some kool-aid guzzler is going to try like hell to make you feel like your problems with OS X or iOS or Final Cut Pro or QuickTime codecs ("using Apple products for more than five years," basically) are your fault and not Apple's.
If they honestly wanted to add functionality, the Firefox developers could do it in a way that didn't disrupt existing users. Apple did this more or less right with Spaces, Expose, and the Dashboard - I don't use any of them, I never will, and I don't have to to perform the same basic tasks I've been using a Mac for since the 90s. The shortcuts are on the keyboard and in the system preferences but it's difficult to accidentally invoke these things unless you're looking for them. They're unobtrusive.
The frequent buzzwordy trendy chrome-chasing "disruption" designed to draw attention to the changes is one of the reasons I left Firefox - I don't need my browser to "reinvent" itself at random. That happens enough with iTunes, thank you. I need it to get faster, run the add-ons I want, and otherwise not change at all. Firefox isn't really a browser anymore, it's a UX playground with a captive audience that's slowly trickling away to browsers that don't change their core functionality as much, or as often.
Chrome recently tried to push graphical bookmarks on me - an under-handed and unannounced violation of trust that gave me a panic attack. Fortunately the change was easily reverted, but it was a harsh reminder that no browser is safe - developers drunk on kool-aid can and will change whatever they want whenever they want it doesn't matter how strenuously users object or how well-reasoned our arguments are, we're always dismissed as "edge cases" or brushed off with a dismissive "nobody uses a browser that way."