>They are supported on just about every device and platform
Except they aren't. I recently used a simple SVG in a background and Safari wasn't able to render it properly so after trying lots of different things I gave up and used different sizes of raster images instead.
SVGs also are mostly unsupported for og:image tags (dependents on the app/browser). I know it's supper specific and I am not even sure if open graph is standardized protocol or not, but it's used everywhere.
What was the SVG that didn't work? In Jon's example in the original post, the SVG he embeds there was one he wrote in around 2005. That's a pretty impressive run for it to render 20 years on...
This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
Having said that I think these American pick-ups (and large SUV's, they are part of the same problem) are a common sight here as well and should not be allowed on the road (unless maybe you can show you need one for work or business).
I see those in Sweden as well. But I also know that people are stupid. And I rather have a stupid person on a stupid bike than a stupid person in an SUV. Especially since in an accident, they will lose in any case because most are likely not street legal.
> This seems to be concerning but as a Dutch person who has lived in the UK for a long time the relatively recent home-grown 'fatbike' issue seems to be a much more pressing problem for Dutch road safety than this and isn't being dealt with effectively as far as I understand.
This is the appeal to worse problems fallacy. Both are problems, both need to be addressed.
They are routinely modified to exceed legal speed limits and owned by 10 year old or younger kids. Going nearly 30mph on a footpath whilst holding a mobile phone.
I think they are also unregistered.
Easily modified to go as fast as 50 MPH on a chassis not designed for it. Drivers aren’t licenced and often are young kids. No registration. No insurance. No training. Very hazardous to pedestrians.
Yes- in the Netherlands the term 'fatbike' is pretty much synonymous with the battery powered bikes only (I presume elsewhere this may be different). They are mini motorcycles really- but exempt from all the rules and regulations that would apply to regular motorcycles.
This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).
I usually feel ambivalence with announcements of new C# versions.
Yes, a lot of great features have been added over the years. But it also introduces some amount of cognitive load and confusion. Take the first new feature in the example:
> Field-backed properties simplify property declarations by eliminating the need for explicit backing fields. The compiler generates the backing field automatically, making your code cleaner and more maintainable.
Huh, I thought we have had this for years, what were they called, ah Auto-Implemented Properties- so why is there a need for this? In this example:
// Automatic backing field with custom logic
public string Name
{
get => field;
set => field = value?.Trim() ?? string.Empty;
}
Ah so it's a way to access the backing field of Auto-Implemented Properties if you need more logic. And in the above can we just say:
get;
or do you need to refer to the field keyword explicitly in the getter if we use it in the setter?
I feel like the documentation is always somewhat lacking in explaining the reasoning behind new features and how it evolves the language from earlier versions.
> The new syntax avoids having to do that "double" declaration.
Yes, that's right. It is in other words a way to access the compile-time generated backing field for auto-implemented properties. It is quite nice to be honest, I just wish they presented a bit of context in their announcements.
Agreed. I feel like we're getting diminishing returns out of the language as they try to squeeze out every last keystroke (as though the challenge of software development is in the typing)
I'm thankful I've been along for the ride so I know the "archaeology" but pity those freshly dunked into its increasingly complicated ocean
An incredibly beautiful visualisation but I felt the same. As well as being confused by the threshold map, at first the text seems to suggest that the 'binary' image is the input to the dithering algorithm in order to 'flip' some of the whites to black and vice versa but then it uses a gray area as input to the threshold map.
I'm interested in starting out like this, I have a bunch of 2.5" SSD's I'm not using- do you have any tips on what cube to get? Are you concerned about power usage at all especially if this is always on?
Any of those cube gaming ones I think are great. I got a dual chamber one which makes shuffling drives and cabling easy. Can't remember the name but it was 90 pounds, way more than I paid for the old 4U, although inflation from the 90s probably means it was more expensive in real terms. Most of the power is used to spin rust so not sure it's worth worrying about the HW power use, just use whatever old pc you can get for free, ask colleagues and family, people throw out working PCs all the time, it's a NAS, not a rendering farm, if it boots it's good enough IMHO.
Same here (on a Pixel 7). Apart from there being absolutely no reason to upgrade, really, even with the generous trade-in values offered by Google around the time of release. I kind of miss the time when a new smartphone release was exciting.
Could anyone more across the detail of this chime in on what this means for the 'average' .NET developer?
I rely heavily on LINQ calls in a .NET (Core) Web App, should I replace these with Zlinq calls?
Or is this only helpful in case you want to do LINQ operations on let's say 1000's of objects that would get garbage collected at the end of a game loop?
It means that if you find a performance problem, and you could hand-code that performance problem away (e.g. use some for-loops and preallocated buffers etc instead of wrestling enumerables, adding to lists) then you may find it useful, because you can keep the code cleaner.
This is to the Queryable/Enumerable extensions what ValueTask is to Task, or ref struct to struct etc. If you are the type of developer that sees great benefit switching from Task to ValueTask then you will probably find this useful too.
In the article author writes about linq.js that he is not maintaining anymore but someone forked it.
I guess this library will at some point end up unmaintained after author is bored with it.
So I would not use it in any of my production code of a web app unless I get some problem I need to fix with this library specifically. Replacing all just because “it is faster” doesn’t seem good enough.
As the saying goes: if you don't know if you need something or not, you probably don't need it. :)
I have been using .NET (and LINQ) for many years on a daily basis, and I've yet to run into performance problems that can't be fixed by either rewriting the LINQ statement or do some other quick workarounds.
But will I try out ZLinq? Sure, but I won't create anything that depends on it.
I think many people don’t need to worry performance of reference type allocations vs value type.
I don’t mean to assume you do or do not need to worry about that consideration. But 99% of the code I’ve written does not need to be concerned about it.
I owned a M1 MacBook Air and I was similarly impressed by everything mentioned in this review.
MacOS coming from Windows, not so much. A menu bar 'orphaned' from the application window? A 'File Explorer' (Finder) lacking basic functionality. Dragging a file download onto the Applications folder to install software (what?). Plugging in a 2K monitor to find it is unable to display at native resolution without installing third party apps. MacOS feels like it is some relic from the past.
EDIT: judging from the comments here, I accept it may be part unfamiliarity. Maybe I should give it another go. What resources would you recommend for someone new to MacOS?
Menu bar "orphaned" from application window is a feature - not a bug. It's intentionally in a fixed location on the screen so you can find it every time you look for it. (I am an original Amigan - Workbench had the same approach, but only visible when you right click - oh I miss my Amiga)
While Windows approach of attaching the menu bar to application window was popular for a while, I am now crying just looking at Chrome window and seeing no menu at all. I don't even mention Ribbon blasphemy.
> It's intentionally in a fixed location on the screen so you can find it every time you look for it.
Which is a disadvantage when working with multiple applications as it forces an application switch before you can access the menu, rather than in windows where if you have your app windows staggered, you can immediately click into the other application's menu.
No, it is not click to focus, or rather, the menu click is the focus action. You can overlay an Explorer and Notepad window, for example, and with Explorer in the foreground, click on the File menu in Notepad which brings Notepad forward as well as display the File menu items.
Plus, your mouse travel is far less to get from the app (since it's part of the app) to the menu.
You think it's a feature, but the moment you have multiple monitors or multiple instances of an app it becomes a liability.
There is not that much benefit to the menu bar, expect maybe using less space than the windows taskbar (but then you need a dock and need more horizontal space because you can't stack text).
It's all right and it's not significantly a problem that needs to change but it's far from the best or ideal.
Macintosh has always been application-centric, instead of window-centric desktop. Hence the top application menu that controls the 'application'. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach.
And I'm not sure why anyone would complain that installing (most, not all) applications is just dragging an icon into applications folder.
Apart from sub-Retina resolution monitors being unusable without BetterDisplay, these are all just Apple-isms. The inverse feels just as foreign when you go Mac to Windows, and as a long time Apple user I find the Windows ones strange.
An elegant OS for a more civilized age to paraphrase Obi-Wan.
The menu bar allows for an infinite size target when flinging the cursor at it using the mouse.
What functionality do you find missing? Usually a right/context-click or command click will get what one is not finding.
By way of contrast, the Sidebar will accept an arbitrary number of files/icons, and they stay put, and if one drags into a file dialog window, it updates where it is pointing rather than performing a file copy operation (what happens if one cancels?).
Anything else one wants can be handled via AppleScript.
Similarly, there is drag-drop into Terminal windows, and check out how the commands pbpaste and pbcopy interact w/ Unix pipes and so forth.
FWIW, I miss the (NeXT-derived) Miller-column Filebrowser on Windows, and the "Unix Expert" checkbox on Mac OS, and the right-click pop-up main menu which made some commands gestural on either.
Installing via drag-drop on a disk image into an Applications folder shortcut avoids the need for a special tool to manage app installation and makes uninstalling as simple as dragging into the trash.
The 2K monitor thing is a hardware/firmware/driver issue I'd imagine --- was it sold as supported by the Mac OS you are using it with?
I love the integration with iOS and so I should probably try again and expect a somewhat steep learning curve due to muscle memory coming from Windows.
TBH I expected the monitor to 'just work' so I was a bit surprised it didn't- but apparently monitors in a certain PPI range are less suitable and make text and interface elements look blurry.
For my part, I'm saddened that I can't put up w/ iOS and its limitations, so use Windows on a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 since the closest thing to a successor to the Axiotron Modbook is a MacBook paired w/ an iPad and I hate the Apple Pencil and Sidecar not being as good as Duet enrages me.
Maybe Apple doing a folding MacBook à la the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will finally get me back (bought a 128K Mac when I was younger, and still miss my NeXT Cube).
I find it perplexing that Apple seemingly refuses at the OS level to support DisplayPort MST (multi-stream transport), which is such a common, standard, widely adopted protocol. The biggest impact is that non-Thunderbolt, non-DisplayLink docks can't use more than a single monitor. Back on Intel Macs, the hardware clearly supported this as MST worked great when running Windows.
Dragging downloads into the applications folder is 100% amazing imo!
It's because conceptually everything is supposed to be a standalone executable.
The windows alternative is random installers that put files all over your machine and then questionable uninstallers that still leave half the files discarded everywhere.
But they don't know that so they don't care.
macOS is very appealing to authoritarian control freak because they have the impression of being "in control", ofc the reality is quite different.
One particularly dumb thing is that apps sometimes have various assets that will be modified or used as template/whatever in their App Bundle and this get copied to their Application Support folder, so there is no application install process per se, but it does get done at first launch, and now you are wasting hard drive space just to store files that got duplicated somewhere else.
macOS/iOS App Bundles are extremely large for many cumulative reasons like that. I will note that Apple has no interest whatsoever in improving the situation considering how much they charge for storage...
The only real pain point for me is the slow one-second animation for switching workspaces. It also adds a second of delay to entering and leaving fullscreen, making the fastest computers feel sluggish. And not even accessibility settings can get rid of it. Animations are great for visual feedback but when they stand in your way it gets old fast.
Meanwhile the "eject drive" button in Finder has no animation or other immediate feedback at all when hovering or clicking.
> Dragging a file download onto the Applications folder to install software
I think that's quite intuitive. My problem with it is that seemingly app developers have to implement this correctly, but some don't and so the program just can't be installed that way.
For example with openSCAD you just get an empty window without Applications folder.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted; those are legitimate complaints if you’re coming from Windows. I felt the same way years ago, when I switched (2014-ish).
What about Finder do you not like? It’s pretty customizable. Also, I use Spotlight (Command + Space) more than Finder, I think – it’s probably the number one killer day-to-day feature. Calculator, file search, metadata search, web search all rolled into one.
The other major thing I appreciate about MacOS is that it still exposes lower-level system and device settings if you need it to. Not to the extent of Linux, obviously, but I think they’ve struck a good balance between abstracting the magic and revealing what’s behind the curtain.
In contrast, I have a Windows 10 gaming desktop; that’s literally its only purpose in life, to launch Steam. Granted, at this point I’m very unfamiliar with Windows, having ceased major use of it after Windows 7, but I feel like it hides too much. For example, a few weeks ago I had a lengthy ISP outage, and so I wanted to use my iPhone’s hotspot to get connectivity. Everything I read online said it was as simple as plugging the phone in and accepting the connection, but that wasn’t my experience. Before you blame Apple, this isn’t the crux of the story. I eventually got it to work by disabling the network adapter on my PC. What became difficult was re-enabling it the next day, when my ISP had restored service. I’ve since learned that Device Manager still exists, but I swear I couldn’t find it on that day. The disabled adapter didn’t appear in any of the various Network-related options I looked through, and the only way I got it to work was by finding an option to reset networking settings. On a Mac, the disabled adapter would still be visible in the list, and could easily be re-enabled.
From what I can remember I was expecting drag and drop of files with multiple windows each snapped to the side of the screen to work intuitively but I accept that I was probably thinking of a Windows way of doing this instead of finding the best way to do things on MacOS.
I should probably retry MacOS with this in mind. Thinking of it I suppose I expected MacOS to be as intuitive as iOS, which is a bit unfair.
Your experience with Windows hiding settings reflects mine- I think it's partly because of the mix of modern and classic menus and the latter being harder to find. Using things like Microsoft PowerToys and custom registry settings makes the Windows experience better but you could argue that this should be standard as well.
> Thinking of it I suppose I expected MacOS to be as intuitive as iOS...
It is intuitive, but by the sounds of things you have several years, or decades of Windows muscle memory and experience. If you fight against the way the OS works by expecting to match your experience with a different one, you're in for a bad time.
Apple introduced window snapping in macOS 15. It works, but there are better apps that perform the task. I don't use any myself; I've been a Mac user for over 35 years and have never felt the need to have my document windows tiled.
The menu is a discoverability gift! Pro tip - type a command in the search box under the 'Help" menu in any native app, and it will show you where to find it and show the shortcut if one is assigned.
macOS user gestures extensively for navigation around the OS, so look in the 'Trackpad' settings, where it shows the gestures and allows a degree of customisation.
Edit: Regarding external monitors, Apple haven't sold a non-Retina display for quite a while now. Apple being Apple expect you to buy one of their monitors, or at least one that they've blessed, so 4K really is a minimum.
I always see people hate on Finder and I never understood, I switched to macOS a few years ago for work and I strongly prefer Finder. What don’t you like about it?
EDIT: I thought about this a bit, it’s the tree view. Like 85% of the time I’m in Finder I am using the tree view, which Explorer doesn’t have
Lack of cut and paste without keyboard shortcut contortions
Folder move behavior sucks
Finder is unable to make a view consistent. It will never override where a view has been previously set, even if you choose to use a particular view 'as defaults'.
I am an old macOS user and I agree.
You are getting downvoted because Mac users are ideological zealots who cannot take any criticism about their choices.
I have been subjected to both for a very long time and I have also concluded that often the Windows approach is just superior, more scalable and more intuitive.
The monitor issue is a particular pet peeve of mine because I am absolutely certain Apple did this to drive sales of their monitors. There have been more monitors released recently that match the ideal PPI target that macOS require but otherwise it's a large pain in the ass to work with 3rd party monitors.
And macOS itself has many weird issues with monitors that my PCs just don't have (wake up in particular, and their HDMI implementation is always fucked up for some reason).
macOS looks good and has some quite decent software from passionate people but those are less and less prevalent and subscription push has made many of it quite unappealing.
In my experience this also uses tabulated data or simplified equations based on some geometric parameters (such as the exposed surface area). For the purposes of simulating flight, ball park figures are sufficient to get a reasonably accurate representation of an aircraft's behaviour and stability in various flight conditions. The additional accuracy you get from fluid dynamics simulations is computationally expensive and usually only needed in aircraft design.
There was an ooooold DOS game called Flight Unlimited that correctly(-ish) modeled flaps, rudder, etc, and ran you through a flight school to teach barrel rolls, Immelmann turns, etc.
I've been looking for an Xbox/Console game that lets you fly and crash a plane, shoot things in a game-like context, not slide around in some space invaders bubble with laser turrets painted to look like missiles.
Flight Simulator misses the mark (I think) because it's not so game-y. All the fighter jet games I've tried miss the mark because their physics is way too arcadey. Any recommendations?
I remember Flight Unlimited. Besides what you mention I remember it having very impressive world graphics for its time.
What you are looking for seems fairly niche to me especially on console, the only game that comes to mind is Star Wars Squadrons.
On PC I'm sure the story is a bit different (but not being much of a gamer these days I may not be the best person to ask). It may be worth checking out MicroProse games. This is the legendary publisher of old, with the brand being passed on through various mergers and acquisitions and the current stewards do a remarkable job and publish quality titles. Tiny Combat Arena may be worth checking out as it fits your description somewhat (if you can get past its stylised graphics).
Appreciate it! I know it's kindof niche, but Tiny Combat Arenas description seems exactly on point, unfortunate that it's only on PC.
I never considered Star Wars Squadrons, all the reviews on console seriously dragged the game, and I don't have a lot of time (and I think their multiplayer is kindof dead by now), but it has been coming up at $8.99 when I was paying attention so I'll keep an eye out.
Except they aren't. I recently used a simple SVG in a background and Safari wasn't able to render it properly so after trying lots of different things I gave up and used different sizes of raster images instead.