The Facebook Serpent and the Content Farmer - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2015/03/29/the-facebook-serpent-and-the-content-farmer-or-how-google-facebook-can-rebuild-our-trust/

<comment><USER2> Note that this is a bit of an exaggeration:

> The same holds true of Google, which the FTC had dead to rights for > manipulating their search results in favor of their homegrown services and > AGAINST their own partners. When Google works against its own partners > covertly, what would a reasonable person call it?

Or at least seems to me that way[1]. "works against its own partners covertly" it a bit presumptuous as well - certainly implies malice and intent.

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure how this article ties in with reality. Right now if you are a "content creator" you would actually be the one paying Facebook in order to simply be able to reach your own fans (Pages). Or, you simply ignore it and let your users do the Facebook-promoting for you.

While I'm not saying that the current status quo is good, how did we get from that, to Facebook paying content creators to link to their (freely available) content?

> These [content creating] companies do not need Facebook, Yahoo, Google, or > Twitter — in fact, the opposite!

How so? Facebook has "the global audience" \- of certain age groups, at least. It is the closest thing to an online passport. Content creators get traffic from Facebook. Facebook gets traffic because of interesting content shared. They don't "need" Facebook, but it certainly doesn't hurt them that people have a quick way to share their content with tons of people.

[1] [http://nypost.com/2015/03/30/senate-may-probe-ftc- decision-t...](http://nypost.com/2015/03/30/senate-may-probe-ftc-decision-to- give-google-a-pass/)

> The FTC's competition staff in 2012 recommended suing Google over three > practices deemed harmful to consumers and rivals, including "scraping" > content illegally from other sites and restricting advertisers from placing > ads with rivals.

> Instead of suing, however, the FTC reached an agreement with Google in > January 2013, in which the search giant voluntarily agreed to change its > practices to appease regulators.

> It is not unusual for FTC commissioners to vote against taking legal action > when different divisions of the agency's staff fail to reach a consensus, a > DC source said.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's taken a decade, but content companies are now becoming independent, > strong, and profitable entities. From Netflix, which pays content creators > in advance for their work, to Buzzfeed, Vice, The Information, Re/code, and > beyond, we're seeing a class of independent and strong content-lead > companies.

Uh... huh.

Netflix's model is about, what, 95% content produced for other distribution mediums (theatrical/broadcast/cable) that Netflix is paying a relative pittance for because the marginal cost of distributing them on Netflix after they've made their money elsewhere is very small and so they don't need to bring in a lot of money from Netflix in order to be worth the distribution deal. Buzzfeed is... well, you make about $100 per article writing for Buzzfeed.[1] The median salary of a journalist in the U.S. is $37,501.[2] As a conservative estimate, let's double that -- because as a Buzzfeed frelancer you aren't getting employer medical benefits, you have to pay your own payroll taxes (anyone who's ever worked freelance/contract knows that the taxes listed on a typical paycheck are only about half of the taxes that are actually paid, depending on the breaks), you aren't getting paid vacation and sick days, you have to provide your own computer, Internet, utilities, etc. So you need to earn $75,002 as a Buzzfeed writer to match the median salary of a journalist in real terms. So you need to write 750 articles for Buzzfeed in a year in order to hit that medium salary, maybe a bit fewer if you can do some longer articles at a higher rate, but that's still about the same in terms of wordcount.

And what kind of content are these underpaid Buzzfeed writers actually cranking out? Go through and actually read the articles under BuzzFeed News on the front page. Right now, there's an article about Trevor Noah becoming the host of the Daily Show, which seems to mostly rely upon promotional materials put out by Noah on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, video of Noah on The Daily Show and his stand-up show, and a GQ cover he was on. Count up how many of those things are paid for directly or indirectly by someone else, mostly Comedy Central. The article on the Germanwings pilot seems cobbled together from AP, Reuters, New York Times and Sky News articles -- written by people making that $37,501 salary that our BuzzFeed writers aren't going to get.

The author sees "a class of independent and strong content-lead companies." I see a bunch of places that are either piggybacking off the products of other, Old Media entities or getting by on a business model that pays people below- poverty wages for content -- and sometimes both. I don't think that's independent or strong or even content-led.

1) [http://whopays.scratchmag.net/?s=buzzfeed](http://whopays.scratchmag.net/?s=buzzfeed) 2) [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journalist/Salary](http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journalist/Salary)

</comment><comment><USER4> for those who haven't seen these two relevant veritasium videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for the post. The story made me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER6> I feel Google goes above and beyond to financially compensate content creators, at least as far as YouTube is concerned. Google even automatically detects duplicated content in other people's YouTube videos so that true creators can monetize stolen copies of their own work on the same platform if they choose.

In contrast, freebooting on Facebook is becoming an enormous problem. Facebook has a ton of hidden throttles in place which prevent external links such as YouTube from going viral; they automatically favor stolen reuploaded copies instead. Those who help Facebook to profit from this theft are rewarded with more exposure and more likes.

Silent victims are being robbed en masse like this by Facebook on a daily basis, and many will never realize it.

A recent depressing example I noticed was a video by a woman named Leslie Hall, whose entire combined view count for all of her copyrighted YouTube videos over the past nine years was around 12 million. It seems like she's poured a lot of money and effort into trying to get attention with her strange videos. Nothing ever really caught on, until finally one of her videos exploded in popularity, receiving over 16 million views in just one week - more views than all of her life's work on YouTube had ever received. Unfortunately, it was a freebooted copy on Facebook which did not even bother to include her name anywhere. People interested in seeing more of her work were unable to do so, unless they went the extra mile and performed a google search for the chorus. That's how I found her, so I emailed her to let her know she might want to send a DMCA takedown notice or something. She was extremely upset about the situation.

The same problem applies to other content theft rackets like 9gag, funnyjunk, imgur, etc. All of these companies have made millions of dollars by stealing other people's work and hiding behind the false claim that it's "too much work" to put honest effort into finding and redirecting to the true creator of anything that goes viral on their own site. Creators of webcomics are perhaps the biggest victims there. I've contacted comic creators in the past when I noticed their stolen comic going viral on one of these sites, and many have said they were silently furious any time it happened.

I believe these sites should be legally required to implement something like what Google does with YouTube, even if it's just a low-tech solution involving a single employee who sits there manually performing reverse image searches all day. As it stands, none of these companies are any more ethical than Kim Dotcom's Megaupload; the only difference is that the victims are small, scattered, and don't have hundreds of millions of dollars available to spend on bending law enforcement to their will to punish these sites that steal from them.</comment>


Number of overall tweets dropping dramatically - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tweets-on-twitter-is-in-serious-decline-2016-2 <comment><USER2> I'd been wondering. The last few months on Twitter for me have felt much less engaging.</comment>


Animated Data Visualization of World War II Fatalities - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/this-animated-data-visualization-of-world-war-ii-fatali-1709065880

<comment><USER2> This is very impressive. And I particularly liked the closing credits to the movie, where he identifies himself as the 'coder' of the documentary. Some impressive custom coding in there.</comment>


How to take my product to the next level? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm Suhas. I've been mostly a lurker in here. Few years ago, I had built an app called Horcrux Email Backup. https://thehorcrux.com/ . It's an app that let's you easily backup your emails as well as move your emails between different providers. It got slightly popular when it got on the first page of HN, long time ago.
Thanks to that, It was mostly a passive stream of income for me over the years. I'm starting to believe it was just a passive side project since I couldn't figure out how to scale it, marketing-wise.
I recently did a whole redesign and improvements to the app that I'm quite proud of. Now, I want to get to the hands of the people now. That's just super tricky.
I was wondering if I can get any advise to improve the marketing aspect and make this a sustainable business.
Regards, Suhas <comment><USER2> Here are a couple things that can help you get started.

1\. Start talking about your product in communities where your most potential users exist. You'll have to manually recruit your users/customers in the beginning.

2\. Once you've got good enough users on board(Which you already have, from looking at your website), request for recommendations. This is your the most important litmus test for product growth as it indicates whether your product is good enough to be recommended to their closest friends.

3\. Once you have enough confidence, write a blog post on Medium about your product, the story and how it has already helped your early customers/users.

4\. Launch it on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a great place to launch new products and get exposure to potential customers. ([https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product- hunt-7...](https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product- hunt-7c1843e06399))

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone sent me a link to this question and I recorded a podcast episode answering it. Listen to it here: [https://anchor.fm/yelluw/episodes/c36f40](https://anchor.fm/yelluw/episodes/c36f40)

Hope it helps you level up :)</comment>


Twitter Suspend the Account of Somali Al-Shabaab Jihadi Group - <AUTHOR> http://arabcrunch.com/2013/09/twitter-suspend-the-account-of-somali-al-shabaab-jihadi-group.html

<comment><AUTHOR> you might hate Al Shabab and call them terrorist? but do not they have the right for free speech? have their voices has been heard I do not think there would be such attacks.</comment>


Show HN: my open source "reddit"-like community - <AUTHOR> http://whoaverse.com

<comment><USER2> An open-source Reddit clone written in .NET

For the developer, it seems like a good way to learn more about web development.

Aside from learning or novelty value, I would probably just fork the Reddit repo on Github if I was looking for a clone, as the reddit.com site code is already open-source:

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit](https://github.com/reddit/reddit)

<comment><USER3> Or use the [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) code:

[https://github.com/jcs/lobsters](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters)

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked out lobste.rs and I liked it. Thanks! I also noticed that Lobster github repo currently has 22 contributors. Comparing Lobster to a 1 man project is not fair :p I'll keep working on Whoaverse though, who know what may come out of it :)

<comment><USER3> I wasn't comparing, leepowers said if he needed a community site he'd probably just spin up a reddit (which has even more contributors, six of which look to be really active).

While lobste.rs has 22 contributors listed, it's mostly just jcs, see the contributor graph: [https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters/graphs/contributors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am a 2nd year CS student and this is my side project. The point of the project is to help me better understand asp.net mvc, jquery, sql and all the other bells and whistles that are required to develop something like this. So far, about 90 man hours have gone into this project (only 1 developer). I am constantly improving it and I would love to hear your comments. Go easy on me :)

ps. the site is running on a rather limited VPS instance which costs me about $15/month.

<comment><USER4> I applaud you doing this from scratch (besides stealing Reddits styles), it sounds like you've learned a lot. How'd you decide on this project?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Woah, this isn't just reddit-like, this is like, a direct clone. Did you copy their HTML/CSS file?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I used reddit css file with attribution. Attibution is on the about page: [http://whoaverse.com/about](http://whoaverse.com/about)

<comment><USER4> Ha, I don't know if it's ok to rip people's CSS file and then "attribute" it unless they specifically say that's ok it's still copyrighted.

<comment><USER6> Reddit publishes it on github, the license is here: [https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/LICENSE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 65 people browsing the site right now... please don't kill my VPS :p

<comment><USER3> Genuinely curious: were you not expecting a traffic boost from HN?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I knew, HN was not hugely popular. I was wrong. For a brief moment my post reached HN frontpage and the visits peaked at 70. I tried browsing the site during this peak period and I noticed no difference under this "load".

<comment><USER3> That's always a great feeling when you get a relatively large amount of traffic and nothing breaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your name-generation for those automated accounts are hilarious.</comment>


O(N^2) in CreateProcess - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2019/04/21/on2-in-createprocess/ <comment><USER2> One thing I really miss in a lot of library documentation is performance guarantees similar to that of the C++ standard library.

Yes yes, this method lets me find the index of an element, but is it O(log N) or O(N)? I need to know, otherwise I might inadvertently create O(N^2) code.

<comment><USER3> Yes that would be nice but the O(...) notation is not very useful for choosing algorithms unless you also compare how eg. a O(n) algorithm compares to a O(n^2) given a certain amount of nodes to compute.

<comment><USER4> Complexity bounds do not answer the question of how fast an algorithm or a particular implementation of it is. I don't think anybody claimed that, and that was actually not the problem here.

The problem here is that the implementation exploded when passed an input Nx larger in production than what the implementation was tested with. Complexity bounds would have prevented that problem because "maybe process creating shouldn't be O(N^2)".

So sure, choose an O(N^2) algorithm if its faster than an O(N) one for small enough N, there is nothing wrong with that. But don't do that if the size of the input does not depend on you (or fall back to a O(N) algo for very large inputs).

People doing this is why DDoS are a thing: my O(N^3) server was very fast for 100 connections, who would have thought that someone would DDoS it with 1000 connections - yeah, who would have thought about that, 1000 connections isn't even a real DoS, but whatever.

<comment><USER3> Yes I agree.

What I think is misleading about the general use of O() by programmers is that it is an theoretical construct and other discountineous effects like cache misses (cache size) etc is not taken into consideration and further more the range of n:s for which each algorithm is fastest is often ignored.

Some dummy numbers:

T1 = 0.0000001 n^2 + n

T2 = 100000000 n

Would yield: O1(n^2) O2(n)

Long before n is big enough for a hypothetical server running the O(n^2) algorithm to be slower than the O(n) other effects might cap it.

The best way to find out is empirical testing.

<comment><USER5> Isn't the point the order of growth...? If you double the input size, O(N) will run twice as long, whereas O(N^2) four times as long.

<comment><USER3> No, that's only true at the limit as n goes towards infinity.

And even if you see it as a approximation of growth for big n:s, you need to know "twice what" and "four times what" and "what's a big n" to have any use from it.

For the example with multiplication of 2 n-digit numbers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm) It's O(n^1.585). Need about 1000 digits before it's actually faster than "School book" O(n^2) multiplication.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6nhage%E2%80%93Strasse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6nhage%E2%80%93Strassen_algorithm) It's O(n log n log log n). In practice faster than Karatsuba at 10,000 to 40,000 decimal digits.

Then there is the newest and hottest O(n log n) version, that's not practical at all.

<comment><USER6> Sure, there are some cases where O() can be misleading, but those are the exceptions. You can work in software for a long time without being affected significantly by them, whereas using O(n^2) when you could use O(n) can make your code 1,000 times slower than usable, and it does this frequently.

I have fixed hundreds of O(n^2) algorithms over the years, made them O(n) or O(n log(n)), and made the product dramatically better. The fact that an O(n) algorithm can sometimes be slower than an O(n^2) feels more like pedantry than useful information in this context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I absolutely love this series

</comment><comment><USER6> Update: Microsoft has built a fix for the issue.

[https://twitter.com/mamyun/status/1120878048620892166](https://twitter.com/mamyun/status/1120878048620892166)

Pretty quick work - two days after the blog post.

</comment><comment><USER8> It looks like the author of this article tested with Windows 7 and Windows 10.

What would be really interesting is if the same tests could be performed with all of the other, older versions of Windows... why? Well, then you'd know the version of Windows in which this phenomena first appears (it could not possibly have existed in Windows 1.0 and probably didn't exist until several subsequent versions later). So that knowledge of where it first appears could be interesting... That is, I'd love a Raymond Chen deep-dive explanation for the Microsoft "why" of this phenomenon...

<comment><USER9> It is caused by Control Flow Guard introduced in 8.1, so there's no point testing other versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article is about the Control Flow Guard [1] security feature introduced in Win 8.1. The same blog has a few articles about it. Seems that it wasn't performance tested against large binaries in its original development.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/secbp/contr...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/desktop/secbp/control-flow-guard)

<comment><USER11> Seeing how many O(n^2) he found, I think you could've stopped your sentence at tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's very easy to accidentally create O(n^2) code. For example, take a look at the test case added here:

[https://github.com/google/guava/commit/4e41d621c3f413eb31da2...](https://github.com/google/guava/commit/4e41d621c3f413eb31da2d31b6c9d9713cd851f6)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why someone needs 1000 created processes on one server? I worked with IO and CPU bound tasks and never needed more than ~50 processes, even on very big servers. Is there any practical reason for this (besides pure interest)?

<comment><USER14> The article literally answers that. It's very common for unit tests and building infra, especially when ported from POSIX systems.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I thought problem is with thousands parallel processes execution. There problem is with some remainings from previous process runs.

<comment><USER14> ...or with the fact that they're constantly being created and destroyed as some tests/build tasks finish and the new ones are spawned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> O(n^2) is polynomial and perfectly acceptable for many use cases. Basic multiplication is O(n^2), as are many other operations.

        for i = 1 -> n:
            for j = 1 -> n:
                do something

Although, if the outside n differs in size from the inside n, it should be written O(nm).

<comment><USER16> In this case it doesn't seem to be. Although admittedly executables as large as in the article are rare, process creation on Windows is slow enough as it is, without extra inefficiencies.

As an aside, basic multiplication is O(n^2) only if your number type is arbitrarily wide. Standard 32-bit or 64-bit multiplication as implemented in hardware is constant time.

<comment><USER3> It's tautological to state that for a fixed number of nodes, mutliplication is constant time.

Off course it is. The n is fixed.

Also as a side note, n^2 is not the lowest order algorithm for multiplication.

<comment><USER17> No, what is meant by that, is that multiplying 2 by 3 takes about the same time as multiplying 432434232 by 1213213213. Not only bounded time, about the same.

<comment><USER15> What's the runtime of 75^4096 mod 236?

<comment><USER18> That sounds like a problem that is not described by "Standard 32-bit or 64-bit multiplication as implemented in hardware".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe he should have split his 120Mb executable into more executables ... or using a sane number of processes.

It would be bad to have the OS cover this use case by default.

<comment><USER19> You do understand that windows creates about 1000 processes on boot alone? A clean start?

(Of those about 100 survive as services.)

In short this fail adds as much as 10 seconds to boot time? (Sort of hidden on most hardware by parallelism, but if you have something not super recent, well...)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but he creates 1000 processes of the same executable with different arguments to run different tests as I understand it. With a really big executable.

That's not the same thing as it's slow to add normal sized processes.

<comment><USER20> That's not out of the ordinary though?

Any time you compile C or C++ code, you're creating a process from the same GCC/Clang/whatever executable but with different arguments for each source file. For a big project, it's not uncommon for there to be thousands or tens of thousands of small source files. Creating and maintaining processes is the core responsibility of an operating system.

<comment><USER3> gcc is like 1Mb. It would be interesting if he did the same test on Debian or something with default options.

I would personally link in the tests as a shared lib or something. chrome.exe on my laptop is around 1Mb. That would probably speed up his tests more than his hacks to the validation routine.

<comment><USER6> I have been told that moving the meat of unit_tests.exe to a DLL would avoid the repeated CFG initialization costs (they would be paid on the first CreateProcess call and then the CFG data would be shared). This wouldn't speed up the tests "more" than my change did (it would speed up the tests slightly less, actually), but it would be a possible fix.

But, such a change would be more work. And, honestly, it shouldn't be necessary. Windows could avoid this problem by using an O(n) algorithm for the initialization, or by sharing the CFG data between .exe files as well as .dll files. I am content with my current workaround and I'll consider reverting it when the underlying OS issue is fixed.

Note that the chrome executable on Linux contains all of the code so it is 50-100 MB. It is only an accident of history that chrome.exe on Windows puts all the code in chrome.dll/chrome_child.dll</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you join a non-commercial internetwork? - <AUTHOR> No banners, no webshops, no asking for donations, subscriptions or paywalls, in short, no for-profit activity allowed.
Only people doing stuff for fun and making it available to everyone else for free, on their own expense because they want to do it?
It'd have its own DNS system, everyone gets a public routable IP so they can host their services, and everyone can register one domain name that's not already taken.
The list of registered domains would be available to anyone so discoverability would be possible.
Should we build something like this on top of the public Internet and live a more simple life? <comment><USER2> I like this idea a lot.</comment>


Prime numbers (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Prime_numbers.html <comment><USER2> Number 6 on the unsolved problems list ("Is there an arithmetic progression of consecutive primes for any given (finite) length?") was solved affirmatively in 2004: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER3> I once wrote a small python code that spat out a melody made from the difference between consecutive prime numbers. Probably not of significant import for mathematical research. But fun to listen to.</comment>


Facebook Accidentally DDOS'd Me - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fareskalaboud/facebook-accidentally-ddos-d-me-fcbf509b507b <comment><USER3> This reminds me of an exploit somebody found last year where they could force facebook to do a DDOS attack for them:

[http://chr13.com/2014/04/20/using-facebook-notes-to-ddos- any...](http://chr13.com/2014/04/20/using-facebook-notes-to-ddos-any-website/)

</comment><comment><USER4> One could point out here that Facebook have nothing to do with this - <USER2> problem is entirely that PhotoGap have not cleaned up their DNS records and they are still sending traffic to that IP.

That wouldn't give such a clickbait title though, would it?

</comment><comment><USER5>
        > now I have to destroy this droplet and start over.

Can you not just get a fresh IP on Digital Ocean? You can on Scaleway.

</comment><comment><USER6> 2 requests per second does not DDoS make. Silly clickbait title.</comment>


Yes, bacon really is killing us - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/01/bacon-cancer-processed-meats-nitrates-nitrites-sausages <comment><USER2> Worst part:

The trouble, as Jill Pell remarks, is that most of the bacon labelled as nitrate-free in the US "isn't nitrate-free". It's made with nitrates taken from celery extract, which may be natural, but produces exactly the same N-nitroso compounds in the meat. Under EU regulation, this bacon would not be allowed to be labelled "nitrate-free".</comment>


Show HN: DatoCMS – An alternative to Contentful for static websites - <AUTHOR> https://www.datocms.com/?src=cta <comment><USER2> DatoCMS is really impressive, but the fact is developers usually only need a CMS for clients, and clients are going to raise holy hell if the commercial CMS you set up for them 2 years ago goes out of business.

So while all things being equal I'd prefer to choose the indie business, having been down this road before I am wary. Especially since the CMS is not a layer on top of git, so getting content out and ready for another solution will not be pretty.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just wish there was a content editor for GitHub a little better than [http://prose.io/](http://prose.io/).

Prose is great, but not good enough for HTML, customization or other static site generators than Jekyll.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried netlify-cms ? I have been using it for my friends site and we both are quite happy with it.

<comment><USER5> Netlify-cms seems alright, deff pretty rough around the edges though. It could use some polish and some more features 100%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I learned about Dato a while ago and was pretty impressed ever since. Unfortunately I don't really have a need for it right now as I rarely do that kind of client work, but if I was in such a situation Middleman + Dato + Netlify would seem like a fantastic combination.</comment>


iTunes will never work well - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@firasd/itunes-will-never-work-well-973674420fa4 <comment><USER2> i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible.

the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design.

they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow...

... i could go on and on, but having zero-discoverability is highly unforgivable, its an entire, rock-solid argument on its own.

<comment><USER3> Their reputation stemmed from the days where everything _was_ discoverable. Want to delete a file? There's a trash can glued to your dock. Need to perform a function but don't know the name? Look it up in the Help menu's search box.

Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, _starting from the edge of the touchpad_. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.

I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.

Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.

Sent from my MacBook Pro

<comment><USER4> As someone who got to use a PowerBook G4 (running 10.5.8) from time to time (in fact, I'm typing this very comment on it), I fail to see how their current UI is any more undiscoverable than the UI from 7 years ago.

The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the "Remove from dock" is still there in both versions. Any menu items that will open a dialog still indicates with three dots ("...") in both versions. Shortcut for opening dictionary is still not very discoverable in both versions (Cmd-Ctrl-D). I still don't know how to trigger Space/Expose without either using gesture (in 10.11) or look up the shortcut key (in 10.5).

I always see people saying Apple UI got worse in discoverability for the past few years and make it sounds like earlier releases were perfect, but I don't believe that is true. The bad part of the UI interaction was always there (e.g. drag icon from the dock to somewhere to remove it). The main difference I see is that 10.11 has a LOT more features than the 10.5, but the core interaction remain the same in regard to discoverability. In 10.11, we're exposed more to gestures, because it's quick, but there is always alternative way to trigger something without gesture.

<comment><USER5> I'd go back even further to find decent Mac UI, to the pre-X OS. Yes, it was a reliability garbage fire, but the Apple of that time really invested in usability. They published a 400-page book[1] for developers that explained the principles behind usability, showed how interface design fits into the development process, and gave specific guidelines for each type of interface element. The guidelines they publish today[2] are a lifeless husk by comparison.

[1] [http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf](http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf) [2] [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000957-CH4-SW1)

<comment><USER6> [1] is a great resource and a lot of it is still relevant. Thank you for linking to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It must be really hard to maintain and add features to such a huge old application. Platforms have changed underneath it, the devices and services it connects to have come and gone, Objective C has changed a lot as well. And then there's the Windows version...

Still, iTunes is crap. I hated it so much that I wrote my own music player for iOS, just to avoid using iTunes for putting music on my phone [1].

My guess is that sooner or later, iTunes will be dismantled and the features will be split into multiple smaller apps. There will be a music app that JUST plays music from the Apple Music account, a podcast app that JUST plays podcasts, a sync app that JUST helps you manage stuff on your phone etc. Some features will be removed (Internet radio, ripping & burning CDs). And of those that remain, only a few will need to keep a Windows counterpart. That way, things will be easier to maintain.

[1] Tiny Player: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1140849233)

<comment><USER8> I think Apple would have split up iTunes long ago if it were only a Mac application, but they don't want to distribute a bunch of smaller Windows apps.

<comment><USER9> Is that so? Some years ago I remember some rando's blog post that seemed to completely invent this narrative from thin air, and it got repeated a lot by Apple fans who have never built Windows applications and probably grossly overestimate its cost. This seems like a pretty lame excuse for one of the world's most powerful companies to not do something it would otherwise want to do.

<comment><USER8> I don't guess it's a cost issue. iTunes is the Apple trojan horse into the Windows platform. They know that they can get anything onto a Windows desktop by crammng it into this one application. My guess is that strategically they don't want to give this up.

<comment><USER9> So you don't think apple can break up the app into various components and provide a single installer and call the whole bundle "iTunes".

And failing that, you don't think users are capable of installing multiple things or coping with a re-brand.

But if they did this only on the Mac all these things would work. Windows is the key.

Sorry, I do not think this is the reason. More likely they just don't want to put resources into a ground up overhaul of iTunes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though?

The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a white screen and can't pick what music I want to listen to. My workaround is to pull the menu up from the bottom of the screen and just hit "play" and then it usually works.

But iTunes itself, I do like.

<comment><USER11> The lack of async and modal dialogs drive me nuts with iTunes. My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback--they should be completely separate things. Ideally separate applications.

<comment><USER12> > My main gripe is syncing my ipod or phone interrupts music playback

It doesn't though. I just tried. Start playback, plug phone (keeps playing), sync (itunes still playing), disconnect, itunes has never stopped playing.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the correction.

I've honestly stopped using iTunes for the most part after 10+ years of problems like that. It's weird, but I'll listen to music on my phone while using my computer. I also sync phones/ipods a lot less often since so much has moved to the cloud. It may not interrupt playback, but I swear I still see modal dialogs when syncing.

I still think they should be completely separate applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple needs to allow importing songs into the Music app on iOS from any source, not just iTunes and its own store. This has been a long standing pain point. Not everybody wants Apple Music and not everybody wants to buy music from Apple. But there are people with existing music collections who want to add them to iOS devices easily without having to use iTunes.

This procedure works for iBooks, where you can add books from any source online through the share sheet. But it's not allowed for Music in 2016^, nearly 10 years since Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on DRM.

^: presumably due to licensing issues and/or agreements with the record labels and/or wanting a monopoly on music

<comment><USER14> Isn't that what iTunes Match did (does?) for a fee?

<comment><USER15> No, iTunes Match simply allows you to sync your music via iCloud. If you have a song on your computer in iTunes, Match will find the song in their catalogue and let you download that to your iPhone, or it will upload the music file from your computer and let you download that to your iPhone. It was basically a way to cut the cord, so to speak, and not have to actually sync your phone to your computer.

You still need iTunes for it all to work in the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As far as I have used iTunes the only problem I see with it is trying to do EVERYTHING in a single package. It tries to be

\- music player

\- content manager (music & video)

\- sync manager

\- update manager

\- Apple Music client

and these are the five things I can name on top of my head, without opening up the app. This is fine, but they are not honoring their boundaries. When I am listening to my music, don't mess me with the sync business. If there is a new version, put a helpful icon but only steal my focus if I click to sync tab.

It's like going to a supermarket to buy a piece of candy. Sure there are meats and potatoes on the next shelves but I need my candy. Yes I can hear you overhyped sales person about the discounts but. I. Need. My. Candy.

Also I cannot see the logic behind the Apple Music's integration with iTunes. I have tried to use AM with iTunes on windows and it is not a fun experience I can tell you. Spotify, even though people are grumbling about its ux, provides a smoother experience. Search, double click play, right click to save or add to a customized playlist. Or mess with that knob to download.

<comment><USER17> The problem is, they can never satify everybody. I bet you that if they ever split iTunes up in separate apps like you suggested there will also be a lot of people who dislike that approach and rant along the lines of "Why did they split it up? It was so convenient to have everything in one place. Now I have to open a multitude of apps" No matter how much sense that may make, there will be people like that. The question is, how many compared to people who want things to be plit up. Apple would be best served to conduct some polls or maybe even a nice beta programm where you can use separate apps and then give feedback if it works as intended.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Satisfaction is not an objective commodity. But Apple Music really, definitively, needs its own app considering the problems it creates in people's iTunes libraries.

<comment><USER18> I agree, but doubt it will happen.

Step by step, Apple are pushing their customers towards subscription services. They did it with photos first, then music. From macOS Sierra onwards they'll be doing it with the "Documents" and "Desktop" directory.

iTunes has always acted as an advance party for Apple's next business experiments. It gets UI changes ahead of the OS. It gets "features" like this subscription funnelling ahead of the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have never seen any software turn adults into a pile of tears faster that iTunes. Trying to put music on your iPhone the night before a trip is the most god damn frustrating thing in modern software.

It literally can't be done. If all you want to do is copy a few songs to your iPhone you can't fucking do it. It tries to sync your phone. Then says "warning: this will delete everything". What the fucking fuck motherfucker. I just want to copy a dozen god damn mp3 files into a file system. It's not hard!

Syncing is a broken concept. There's no such thing as syncing. There's no such thing as being in sync. No PC, Mac, or iOS device of mine can ever be fully sunk. (sync'd?)

The totality of "my stuff" is a venn diagram. Things on my iPhone. Things on my iPad. Things on my Macbook. I have save data shared across devices. But also save data unique to each device. I own 100Gb of music. Most of it is on my Macbook. Some of it is on my iPhone. None of it is on my iPad. I even own music downloaded to none of these devices. Those purchases exist only in the cloud. Plus god knows how many apps I've bought and since deleted.

There is no such thing as syncing. No device can ever be fully sync'd. Fully up to date. The whole idea of syncing is fundamentally broken and wrong.

Fuck iTunes. No iPhone of mine will ever know iTunes ever exists. I now use Spotify. I download music to my phone for trips. My phone will _never_ be connected to any Mac or PC.

If you must copy music don't use iTunes. Once upon a time I used Copytrans. It's free and gets the job done. [http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/](http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager/)

(This rant brought to through the sobbing tears of my partner. Thanks iTunes. You worthless piece of shit.)

<comment><USER20> Copytrans now costs $20.

There is no good tool for "just put some fucking music on my iPhone" that doesn't cost money that I've ever been able to find.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The single worst thing about itunes, in my opinion, is the way it handles duplicate songs. It has a "detect duplicates" feature, but all that does is show a list of groups of songs that it thinks are duplicates, _and it has false positives!_ But the one thing it can't do, is detect when you've added multiple copies of _the exact same file in the same directory_.

My music collection needs to by synced across computers, and if it refused to add the exact same file twice, then the operation would be trivial. Add mp3s to your music directory, drag and drop all files to itunes, and let it detect new songs. Since it's not, I have to do a long series of "okay, the timestamp on this file is newer than the newest added-on date in itunes.... I think.... except this directory was untarred, so it retains old timestamps, and blah blah blah..."

<comment><USER22> fdupes is your friend in cases like these — it finds duplicate files fast. As usual, the CLI tools are much better at solving problems than a terrible GUI like iTunes.

<comment><USER23> You don't even need a separate tool for that:

      find -type f -name \*.mp3 -exec md5sum {} + \
        | uniq -dDw 32

<comment><USER21> The problem isn't duplicate _files_ , it's that iTunes has an internal list of songs, and it allows the _same_ file to appear in the list twice. I can manage a directory of files, I just can't manage iTunes' indexing of them.

I understand why you would have assumed this was a file issue, though, because the real problem is the most idiotically stupid thing ever.

<comment><USER24> Isn't the library simply a big .xml file? I wonder if you could parse it yourself to get rid of the duplicate.

I would try but I have a 20k+ songs itunes library and it takes hours to reindex whenever I move anything...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you're using a Mac then you should go buy yourself a copy of Swinsian now:

[http://swinsian.com/](http://swinsian.com/)

It's a lean, fast native player that supports tons of formats, has great library management features, and omits all the bloat and confusion of iTunes.

<comment><USER26> It doesn't really matter to me, as I'm not a Macintosh user anymore, but does it have the smart playlist feature like iTunes?

That's the biggest thing I miss in most music players, including my current one, Google Play Music (with my all-access).

<comment><USER27> Not sure if you're aware but Simon Weber has a Chrome extension for smart playlists in Google Music.

[https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google- Musi...](https://github.com/simon-weber/Autoplaylists-for-Google-Music)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> iTunes is the worst piece of software I've come across in a long time. I banned it from my computer until I upgraded to my iPhone 7. Now, the only computer with enough disk space to accommodate my backups of 256GB is my personal desktop, so I was forced to install iTunes. It's infuriating and in the 4 years that I haven't used iTunes, it hasn't gotten any better.

I would love to blacklist whoever is responsible for iTunes from ever finding work again, because it's obvious they give an ounce of care about UI design or keeping their customers happy. They really don't deserve to be working in software. If they had any honor they would be thoroughly embarrassed for producing such a horrible piece of software.

<comment><USER29> It's obviously not a delightful piece of software, but attacking the team that works on it is mean spirited.

You know nothing about the constraints they work under.

<comment><USER30> [https://xkcd.com/277/](https://xkcd.com/277/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm having a hard time understanding these tweets.

Playing a song and adding songs to 'up next' are two different things. That dialog box has saved me multiple times. What's wrong with it? It only occurs when you are telling iTunes to do conflicting things that it cannot resolve by itself. It's a better outcome than clearing a playlist someone may have spent a lot of time working on.

Software update and login dialogs? Yes those are a thing many apps include. What makes these unique or interesting?

The podcasts menu seems super straight forward to me. Am I missing something here? It says exactly what it does.

Contacting the iPhone update server dialog? Once upon a time Apple's servers would go down under a heavy load of people activating new iOS devices. Presumably the dialog is there to inform you there is a problem contacting the iPhone update servers. Either way I think it's long since been changed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay. So I'm no UX expert, just a developer and I've also worked in product management. I think at some point, if you work in this field, you have to develop instincts around the design and experience of things. A modal (i.e. app-locking) dialog that says "contacting the iphone software update server", which is current behavior and not changed as far as I can tell, is so far out of the realm of acceptable in my view, that if we differ on that point, we can't even begin a discussion about the more subtle issues… (Consider that Chrome updates itself all the time; now imagine if you launched Chrome, typed in gmail.com, and it suddenly locked up all your tabs because it was 'contacting the Chrome software update server'.)

After all, design trades in subtleties, otherwise if the discussion is just about explaining the purpose for a widget, everything in an interface can be explained, even this well-known 'bad UI' example: [http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png](http://i.imgur.com/UJXoqwR.png)

<comment><USER32> The Microsoft AutoUpdate client on OSX is a beautiful mess for this.

 _doing anything else_

> Microsoft AutoUpdate starts bouncing in the dock

> Modal "There are no updates for your Microsoft software at this time." > dialog appears.

Seeing as half of the updates it receives are FOR THE UPDATE CLIENT, it's incredible this behaviour hasn't been fixed in the last eight years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music.

I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

<comment><USER34> > I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave > us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.

They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.

But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd to see happen over and over. There are certainly managers and executives working over each of those groups that should be guiding them in the right direction so that things feel like a "part of the whole".

<comment><USER35> > They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard > that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever > interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.

Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.

<comment><USER23> A company is usually a tree-like structure, where the branches are connected by the root node. Too bad that this particular company's root node was garbage-collected in 2011 while there were still live references to it.

<comment><USER36> But iTunes was already shit when the root node node was still around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Saying "iTunes will never work well" is like saying the sky is blue. Why would anyone need a kitchen sink to copy an audio file to their device? Oh, wait, unless there is manufacturer locks, and controls put in place to steer consumers' capital flow. Oh yeah, that's why. From that perspective I would say iTunes is a smashing success. And this negative social virus has spread like gang-busters spawning countless imitators.

<comment><USER38> This trend is why I started using Linux full time again. I'm not a die-hard believer in the Unix Philosophy, but systems designed with it in mind generally avoid the worst bloat.

I feel like a similar mindset is ruining gaming as well. The best games from the past had a design that I'd compare to movies. The story and fun was self- contained and complete. If another installment was created, it was also self- contained and complete. With rise advent of microtransactions, games seem more like sitcoms or slot machines. The experience of a single episode (or pull of the lever) is a full experience, but it's intentionally designed to feel always feel slightly incomplete.

I mean, the design of games now is pretty user-unfriendly. Anything that could compete with a publisher's ability to charge more for gameplay has been crippled. Simple example -- almost every game used to include god-mode cheat codes that you could use to your hearts content. Now a lot of games charge money for extra weapons and other things that used to be considered cheats, even in the single player modes.

Another example is the team creation tools in EA sports franchises. You used to be able to copy and paste players from one team to another. My brother and I would create teams where every player on the team was our favorite player in Madden and FIFA and pit them against each other. That feature has been absolutely gutted in FIFA, most likely because it interfered with their Ultimate Team mode. However, they gutted it for offline play as well.

I don't fault the developers and publishers trying to makee money. I do think it's really lame that modern games have intentionally locked or removed simple and historically common features in the pursuit of profit. It makes every gaming experience feel like I'm being forced to buy everything from the company store, and it sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> OK, so I use OSX, and I want to play mp3s that I have locally, and see them in a library format that I can search. Even maybe have album art, though I'm not fussed.

Ignoring itunes, how do I do it? What is a good fast low memory music playing app with library management? If I was on Windows I'd be using Foobar2k. On OSX it seems to be either itunes, a command line app, or various bloated messes that aren't honestly better than itunes.

<comment><USER40> Quod Libet is cross platform and runs on my Ubuntu box, Windows Surface and MacBook Pro. It is fast, has a simple interface that actually works and has been extremely stable. It also manages playlists that work in my car's USB port. I do like having my music in the cloud, and finally settled on Dropbox. I am still looking for a decent Android Dropbox music player for this setup, but for iOS, I use Eddy cloud music player/streamer. It even bookmarks my place in audio books. Sad part about Eddy is that it takes so long processing my entire music library on Dropbox and starts the whole process over when reinstalled. Also, haven't figured out how to get it to work with playlists saved to Dropbox, but I have asked for the feature.

It was Apple's changes to the music app on my iPhone that finally annoyed me enough to seek an alternative setup which baffles me, because the only reason I was convinced to ever purchase my first Apple product was an iPod and they have completely screwed it up.

I did use Google Music, but Google's insistence that the desktop doesn't exist made it useless on Windows & Mac. I tried every Google Music app I could find for either platform. They are unstable, often slow, and usually break every time there is an API change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I spent almost two days trying to resync my music after iTunes deleted it for no reason. It's the worst software on the planet.

<comment><USER42> After I subscribed to iTunes Match, it "helpfully" reworked all of my ~4300 song iTunes library so that most of the songs where I ripped a whole CD into iTunes were now spread across various "Greatest Hits" albums from the same (or sometimes different) artist, with random cover art. And after reading Jim Dalrymple's horror stories of upgrading to Apple Music, I am fearful both of ever discontinuing my iTunes Match subscription or upgrading to Apple Music.

My solution thus far has been to stop even trying to listen to music on iTunes and switch to podcasts instead (on Overcast, not Apple's horrible Podcasts app). #ThanksiTunes

<comment><USER43> This is the one complaint I agree with. Honestly, all the so called UX problems in those tweets are eye-rollingly contrived, but there's no excuse for messing with the actual music that I own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Almost every cloud music app I have used has issues with the concept of a "queue" or playing a snippet of something while I am in the middle of a playlist. Spotify, Mog <defunct>, rdio, and itunes seems to never do what I want when it comes to "just checking out a song while other songs are playing".

Lets say you have enqueued up a bunch of songs on Spotify or perhaps have a really good shuffled playlist god forbid you accidentally click on a song instead of queue it.

Because of this annoyance at times I just give up and put on Pandora. Their song selection sucks but otherwise I think Pandora is fairly stress free UX wise.

<comment> yoz-y I really liked queueing in the original Amarok. iTunes kind of halfway gets it right with the concept of Up Next. However it seems now that in iTunes 12 it is no longer possible to queue an album at the end if there is nothing in the queue at all. I'd prefer if the action of playing an album did "put it in queue & play"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't know about the UI or anything but it's 2016 and iTunes still makes me re-download any firmware from start in case of any network issue. So if you are downloading a 2.5 gigs file and that screws up even once in that whole download at any place, iTunes says fuck you. This becomes a problem when they screw up iOS 10 update and brick your iPhone and the only way to fix it is restoring from iTunes and then iTunes keeps giving you the middle finger.

<comment><USER46> Not only that, when I had to re-download the firmware due to the failed iOS10 update, even pausing the download caused it to restart..

<comment><USER47> And interesting if it's downloading some purchased content from the iTunes Store, this doesn't happen. Also, those downloads don't throw a modal dialog when it's trying to "contact the server". It just seems like downloading firmware doesn't reuse existing code for downloading content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's so true. We used to have very simple and efficient music players such as winamp. The problem was that they were playing free mp3 that you stored on your hard drive. With regards to that, iTunes is not a music player, it's a media manager. It's all designed around buying stuff, not playing it. It makes me think of the bad dvds with non-skippable trailers we used to have 10 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm still kinda curious why iTunes has blocked the UI thread so often for such a long time, perhaps a limitation of the overall architecture of the app combined with having webviews everywhere calling out to native code?

<comment><USER49> This is the most annoying in Itunes I tried Apple Music but couldn't stand to wait between each click to album artist and so on. That why I switched to Spotify which is much faster and easy to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> There never was and never will be a better music player than Winamp! #WinampSkins

<comment><USER51> I was happily paying $10/month to Spotify but canceled my subscription because the desktop player was so bad and incomplete. After a while I realized that attempting parity with other players was not on their to-do list.

I'm not even a power user, there are many advanced and obscure features of Winamp/foobar I never used. But those products have the nuances of day to day management of playlists and usability figured out and Spotify in comparison doesn't care. It seems they'd be happier to have you use web/mobile and not even support a desktop player.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting iTunes, too.

While a great quote, it's not entirely true.

Some of us said enough is enough and ditched the iOS/Itunes ecosystem for something better. Why suffer needlessly?

<comment><USER36> And even better, with iOS 10 we can now delete the Music and iTunes apps from our phones.

<comment><USER53> Unfortunately that's not what happens. You can removed it from the Home screen [1], the app keeps using space on your phone.

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204221](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204221)

<comment><USER36> Ah, that's interesting. Well, as long as it's not on my screen I'm happy enough. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> One interesting thing about iTunes is that it is one of the few applications I can think of which manages to irritate both power/sophisticated users (ie. everyone here) and also regular users. I'm not sure _anyone_ actually likes it.

</comment><comment><USER55> So this dude made a couple of tweets, then he wrote a medium article about his tweets.

<comment><USER56> I actually found this method quite readable and a pleasant surprise!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?

<comment><USER58> Stars are old; hearts are new; stars are gone by default, but you can turn them back on in the settings.

Why there's no conversion factor [EG: heart = 5 stars], i don't know

<comment><USER43> There's no reason to convert backwards if they want to phase out stars. Also, I'm guessing they hope to make the act of pressing heart an "experience" for the listener. Give everyone the joy of professing your love of a song to their algorithms. I know I got a dialog playing it up the first time I pressed the heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Hah! I also literally had to Google how to play a song on repeat, but for me in the new iOS 10 Music app.

<comment><USER60> Related: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tfrWqGcsMg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> For OSX VLC is a surprisingly good player for music and it supports FLAC.

However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).

<comment><USER13> Would you mind developing a QuickLook plugin for the latest OS X/macOS releases that could play FLAC? :) I've been breaking my head over it and don't seem to have any solutions.

<comment><USER61> Wouldn't mind at all. Of course, that's not really in my wheelhouse...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm not an iTunes user, but the irony of posting about UI issues on a site that breaks my browser's Back button hit me pretty hard. Ouch. Please don't do that, sites.

</comment><comment><USER63> I like iTunes, but I hate how Apple try to get me to subscribe to Apple Music both on iOS and OSX.

</comment><comment><USER13> When iTunes started, it was fine because there was only music to deal with. But with the addition of other media types in iOS devices, it's become very messy. If you have books and photos on your iOS device, there is no simple way to get these to their respective apps on the Mac (iBooks and Photos/erstwhile iPhoto). Using iTunes will do almost nothing if you aren't buying all your stuff from Apple, except backup all data (including these) into a "hidden" location. You'd have to use each of these apps every time you want to just get the latest from the iOS device to it.

Apple should introduce a simple sync application that will take all photos to Photos, all books to iBooks, all apps to iTunes or some new App app (the removal of app transfer from iOS devices into iTunes is a big issue in different ways), all music to iTunes, etc., along with all the respective user-created metadata (like collections for books, favorites for photos, etc.). Most importantly, this should work for things obtained from non-Apple sources.

(Sometimes I wish Apple would have interviews with users like me to understand how difficult things are and use that to improve its products)

</comment><comment><USER64> I strongly prefer a Unix approach to tools: each tool does one thing, Vasili. One thing only, please. That eases understanding of what is going on. Users are better educated and troubleshooting bugs/flaws is vastly easier. I consider a corporate decision as to what my computer will do irrespective of my wishes to be a flaw.

</comment><comment><USER65> Well to be fair the title might be: iTunes will never work well ON WINDOWS.

I was always wondering why I can read so much rants about a good product I've been using on a daily basis for years... Well it seams that the Windows version sucks, and what is described is really a world away from the native cocoa version on macOS.

<comment><USER19> There is no user experience difference. There hasn't been for at least 10 years. You can't put together a post that says "this is how it works on OS X" versus "how it works on Windows". Because it's the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is why I still use Winamp, and now more and more, Plex.

<comment><USER67> Although I'm a proud owner of a Winamp license, I've been using AIMP over the past year or so. It's blatantly, if not purposefully, a Winamp clone but has a few excellent innovations of its own and is frequently updated. I strongly recommend it for any Winamp fans.

<comment><USER66> Thank you! I just checked it out, and as a long-time Winamp user (I mean... since there was first a Winamp) I see exactly what you mean and I love it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones? Can't you just copy files over and use some other playback app on the iPhone? The author sounds makes it sound like they are "forced" to use iTunes.

(disclaimer: the newest Apple product I own was manufactured in 1983)

<comment><USER23> > Do you still have to use iTunes to transfer music to iPhones?

Don't use an iPhone myself, but if I did, I would try if KDE Connect on iOS supports file syncing over Wifi like it does on Android.

<comment><USER68> KDE Connect is Android-only, and even if there is an iOS version sometime I don't think it would ever be able to support file syncing like on Android due to Apple restrictions on filesystem access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I found the new iTunes for Mac to be quite clean (12.5)

</comment><comment><USER70> I was surprised (and pleased) to see Apple add "rename" to the file menu in Finder for El Capitan. Coming from Windows, I found the "click on a file to rename it" very unintuitive. Evidently a lot of other people did, too.

Now if they'd make it so Finder always opens a window if you select Finder and a window isn't open ...

<comment><USER18> Finder includes your desktop, so technically you already do have a window open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> One of the features I hate in iTunes is adding music to the library. When adding songs it should create a shortcut from the music folder that is being added from rather than creating a copy of the songs in its folder. When creating a copy into the iTunes folder the storage space on the macbook is lowered.

<comment><USER72> I've actually just moved my entire iTunes library into my ownCloud directory and let it sync to my other systems. Windows is fine with it, just point your chosen media app at the folder and it _should_ just ignore all of iTunes' files and grab the music.

Every once in awhile I get a sync error but it never seems to affect anything and sorts itself out, going on about 8 months now with no real problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Off topic trip to Memory Lane:

[http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html](http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html)

</comment><comment><USER74> I am glad people in the reality distortion field of Apple trying to defend this and throw an ad hominem regarding the author, are getting downvoted into oblivion. Maybe they will realize some day.

</comment><comment><USER75> Using VLC with command line to listen to my playlists works great for me

</comment><comment><USER76> Unfortunately iTunes is still better than the competition. I also know that isn't saying much.

RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!

</comment><comment><USER77> "Spotify" just switch now and never look back

<comment><USER78> Spotify has just as bad if not worse UX as iTunes/Apple Music. Spotify kept taking away useful features from their desktop app and promised to return them, but never did, even years later. Plus, I don't need to run another instance of Chrome and Adobe Flash which constantly consumes 5% of my CPU and a few hundred MB of RAM just to listen to some music. While still not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the newest release of iTunes and the iOS music app.

<comment><USER79> I think users like you are part of the reason iTunes is like it is. Never, ever, take away a feature. Never ever refactor the UI to simplify things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> The failure of iTunes is intrinsically linked to the unsuitability of WebObjects as a modern application framework.

iTunes isn't bad because Apple is inept, far from it, but to make it fine at this point would require a rewrite and I assume at Apple there is a tradeoff between "Is this crappy to use" and "Well, does it at least work?", with the latter being a stronger motivator (or in this case, demotivator) of change than the former.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK the vast majority of itunes is a regular cocoa application, what does webobject have to do with anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> iTunes was beautiful up to 10.7. Then they removed the column browser, disabled the Library view, and broke USB sync. I still haven't upgraded, and I'm desperate for another company to step in.

<comment><USER82> Agreed. You can enable the column browser and the library view if you want though. Check the View menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> iTunes is terrible on OS X too. Apple needs to throw it all out and write modular replacement apps for various functionality from the ground up.

</comment><comment><USER84> I have never understood why there is so much hate for iTunes. I think it's fine. It does everything I need it to and probably more. Why put so much energy into debasing something?

<comment><USER85> I think most users would agree with you. Hating on iTunes is popular with tech people, but I don't know if your average person cares.

The biggest complaint I have with iTunes is that it tries to do too many things, and it would be better to break the app up. It somehow got itself into the smartphone and tablet backup business.

Years ago, I wrote that iTunes should be split up into smaller apps: [http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be- sp...](http://interchangeproject.org/2012/04/16/itunes-should-be-split- into-3-4-smaller-more-focused-apps/)

I don't know if I really care that much anymore, as iTunes works fine for my uses, but I'm also no longer a heavy iTunes user. I use my iPhone to play music at home and on the go. I watch movies either on my Apple TV or iPad.

I mainly use iTunes to see what's new in the store. That could be a reflection of using iTunes, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> iTunes is beyond hopeless at this point. It needs a full rewrite, possibly split into multiple apps.

</comment><comment><USER87> Ditto. It has a UX problem.

</comment><comment><USER88> Okay. I get annoyed by things in iTunes and think the whole application really is overdue for replacement -- I'd like to see things split up somewhat more like iOS, with a "Music" app, a "Video" app and (since this is the desktop) a device management app. But I confess that a lot of the lamentations about the UI design (not necessarily the UX design, which I'll circle back to in a moment) strike me as, well, highly overblown. I'm sorry the author couldn't figure out how to make songs repeat, for instance, but while the repeat icon has _moved_ in newer versions of iTunes, it's literally the same icon as in the screenshot of iTunes 4 from a decade ago. (That's the earliest screenshot I could find.) And perhaps the Windows version of iTunes is uniquely horrible compared to the OS X, er, macOS version, but I can type the name of a song into search and have it instantly located; if I double-click a track name (or the big play arrow that shows up when I hover by it!) it just starts playing, but it certainly won't select a rating or a heart unless I click a star or a heart; so on and so forth.

I'd really argue the biggest problem with iTunes' UX stems from the way it's still, after all this time, inexplicably modal. I've never had a problem syncing an iOS device while it's playing music, as one commenter mentioned, but there _are_ dialog boxes it brings up that are not only UI-blocking but process-blocking, which makes iTunes kind of a mess as a headless media server. (It still _plays_ media, but won't be able to add any until the dialog box is dismissed.)

But I still cut iTunes a fair amount of slack. I've been using it for nearly as long as it's been available, I've subscribed to iTunes Match, I've subscribed to Apple Music, and I've ripped my own music library full of lossless tracks. Not only has Apple not, repeat, _not,_ either deleted those or fiendishly replaced the files with AAC simulacra, it turns out to handle mixing my ripped tracks, purchased tracks, and "borrowed" tracks (i.e., ones that are only available in my library through the Apple Music subscription) pretty seamlessly. The introduction of Apple Music was a huge mess, admittedly, both in terms of UX and some teeth-grindingly poor song-matching algorithms (a distinct regression from iTunes Match on its own) -- but the server-side flubs seem to be straightened out now, and the current UI for Apple Music is pretty solid.

But, yes, I'm sure iTunes will be rewritten. I'm also positive that when it is, there will be a veritable explosion of thinkpieces that will almost all be variants of, "Who asked for all these horrible changes? iTunes was just fine! Apple is always fixing things that weren't broken! This would never have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive!"

</comment><comment><USER89> I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface [http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png](http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png)

I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this:

      alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'

<comment><USER90> That's awesome. Do you have any others??

<comment><USER89> Sure. There are a lot of streams available on shoutcast.com, just click the download icon and copy the URL, some stations list their stream URL on the site, just google the call letters + "m3u" or "pls" etc, then there is this site which is the best directory I've found so far radioroku.com. If you use iOS there's also a great app for playing these streams called fstream.

Here is my list:

      alias wor='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wor-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/495/179680/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wor-am 2> /dev/null'
      alias wgy='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wgy-am.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/697/21577/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wgy-am 2> /dev/null'
      alias npr='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.npr.org/streams/mp3/nprlive24.pls 2> /dev/null'
      alias rain='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=2340 2> /dev/null'
      alias rain2='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=368490 2> /dev/null'
      alias rain3='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ9OWMsJBTk 2> /dev/null'
      alias art='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=366888 2> /dev/null'
      alias chopin='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=590375 2> /dev/null'
      alias phil='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=248466 2> /dev/null'
      alias french='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/franceinfo.m3u 2> /dev/null'
      alias fip='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://www.listenlive.eu/fip128.m3u 2> /dev/null'
      alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
      alias 1010='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8733.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WINSAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
      alias ewtn='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://http.yourmuze.com/ewtn-2/mp3-128-s.mp3 2> /dev/null'
      alias wabc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://8723.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WABCAMAAC_SC 2> /dev/null'
      alias wktu='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://wktu-fm.akacast.akamaistream.net/7/110/19973/v1/auth.akacast.akamaistream.net/wktu-fm 2> /dev/null'
      alias chant='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://calmradio.com/playlists-free/gregorian.pls 2> /dev/null'
      alias chanteurs='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://sv1.vestaradio.com:4090/ 2> /dev/null'

<comment><USER91> Thanks for a great list of streams!

I did a similar thing (using `mplayer` though) for me, wrapping it in a script that takes shortcuts for stream names:

[https://gist.github.com/EarlGray/d64514459892650881353a465c4...](https://gist.github.com/EarlGray/d64514459892650881353a465c4b9a05)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> iTunes was a significant factor in me moving to Android.

</comment><comment><USER93> iTunes circa 2008 was amazing. Like so many things, once they unified the bIOs and desktop OS code bases and technologies everything went to shit.

</comment><comment><USER94> This isn't constructive, just spiteful and angry. I can't tell what problem OP actually has with iTunes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm… I'm not spiteful, I just don't have any hope for improvement. iTunes has been chronically bad, I could find thousands of other articles and testimonials about that. At this point the issue is clearly endemic to the product.

Constructively: everything else aside, one glaring and easily-fixed problem is the dialog boxes. No program released after 1997 should be so behind in the state of the art that it throws up modal dialogs that lock up the whole app to say pointless things like "We're checking for updates".

<comment><USER95> I use iTunes every day and have never noticed this modal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Interesting that every single UI example in this article is from an old version of Windows.

Fuck Windows. You want iTunes to work well? You want to see Apple's real UI? Then use their real platform.

<comment><USER35> If iTunes is so awkward why would I want to switch to a whole OS + computer made by the same company?

<comment><USER96> Perhaps because of said company's well-deserved reputation for overall OS and UI quality?

Everyone admits iTunes is not the greatest thing ever to spring from the mind of Steve. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

<comment><USER35> > Perhaps because of said company's well-deserved reputation for overall OS > and UI quality?

Why would I go off reputation and not my own experience with apple software?

<comment><USER97> Because a reputation is the result of the experience of many different people who communicate with each other. Your experience with Apple software is a very small sample.

Your position is a bit like saying: "Although everyone else thinks the earth is round, it looks flat to me!". Of course, you're free to disagree with the consensus opinion, but you'd probably need a better argument than personal experience.

If the consensus differs from your personal experience, it's worth taking a second look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> You missed the point. iTunes is a old product holding together well.

* No doubt if iTunes was designed today it would be completely different. But as a legacy product it has to satisfy legacy users that are familiar with the UI, and legacy products (this iTunes still supports 10 year old iPods and older?!!)

* Say iTunes failed today. No doubt the writer would say it deserved it, and the product was a failure from the beginning. But I want to emphasise that iTunes has existed for several years now and has given many hours of pleasure for many millions of users. it works well and is a success.

You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well. It won't get better. What is going to happen with it? It is obvious. You don't have to go past Microsoft with Internet Explorer. They kept that product going for years and it was a great success. However eventually the tech aged and they replaced it with a new product, Microsoft Edge. The same will happen with iTunes.

<comment><USER99> > You missed the point.

No he didn't.

> iTunes is a old product holding together well.

No it's not, it's a terrible product and always has been.

> You are naive if you think iTunes one day will work well.

He doesn't think that. In fact, the title of the article states the exact opposite.

> What is going to happen with it? It is obvious.

Yes, which is the whole point of the article.</comment></comment>


From Candy to Juleps, Persians Left Imprint on Many Edible Delights - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/19/463583428/from-candy-to-juleps-persians-left-imprint-on-many-edible-delights <comment><USER2> With cuisine you have to be careful in ascribing a unique origin to a word. For example, just glancing at the article I found two words that have a much more nuanced origin.

The article mentions that Candy comes from the Persian Qand, but Qand itself came from Khanda (Sanskrit for cubes of Sugar). Similarly Sugar ultimately derives from Shakkara Sanskrit for sugar. Given Sugar from Sugarcane was first crystallized in India and spread from there, it is more appropriate to go with Khanda.

The Persian Beryani is nothing like the Indian/Pakistani Biryani. The Persian one is basically a fried meat patty with no rice at all!. The Indian one is aromatic rice and spiced meats which in itself derived from rice Pulao the version called pollo in Persian. Rice was cultivated thousands of years in India before it was introduced to Persia (likely via China around 1 century AD) so a version of Pulao finds mentioned in ancient Indian texts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another interesting tidbit: the word 'farangi', which is commonly used for foreigners ('firangi' in Hindi/Urdu) literally referred to the French (i.e. 'Frenchie'), but was later applied to anything foreign.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firangi_%28sword%29#cite_note-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firangi_%28sword%29#cite_note-1)

<comment><USER4> It means "Frank" not "French". It was originally used to describe western Europeans in general.

<comment><USER5> "Frank" and "French" are essentially the same word: [http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=French](http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=French)

<comment><USER6> Yes, but that was because French as a language/culture didn't exist. The historical Franks (including Charlemagne) despite living where France is now, actually spoke Frankish, a language related to German.

<comment><USER5> GP is talking about the people, not the language. "Frank" and "French" are two English words that refer to the same-ish people living in the same-ish part of Western Europe. Saying that a particular Hindi word means "Frank" not "French" is a distinction that doesn't really make sense in context.

<comment><USER4> Same-ish is not the same. That's like saying Anglo-Saxon and English mean the same thing. The distinction is important because the Persians never used that word to specifically refer to Frenchmen but rather to all western Europeans.

<comment><USER5> Anglo and English do in fact mean the same thing. They're the same word, pulled into and out of different languages at different times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A very interesting article. It is always good for world cuisine when a culture participates in international trade. But the article gets a few details wrong, in forgetting the occasions when the Persian language took in loanwords from other languages, for example "tamarind," which comes from Arabic and means "Indian date."

[https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+of+tamarind&oq=ety...](https://www.google.com/search?q=etymology+of+tamarind&oq=etymology+of+tamarind)

</comment><comment><USER8> Many dishes we think of as "Indian" also trace a Persian origin, for example Biryani, Korma, Naan, Jalebi, Gulab Jamun, and so on (pretty much most Mughal- era Cuisine).

<comment><USER2> Indian/Pakistani Biryani is derived from Indian Pulao and not the Persian Beryani which is a meat patty with no rice.

Korma/Naan are turkish or central asian in origin.

Jalebi is semitic possibly arabic in origin.

Gulab Jamun in Persian and it spread both to India and the Arab world.

<comment><USER8> > Indian/Pakistani Biryani is derived from Indian Pulao and not the Persian > Beryani which is a meat patty with no rice.

Pulao and Biryani aren't really the same (well, sometimes they are). Most Biryanis I've had have a lot more saffron and rose-water than any other Indian food I've come across, and many of the places 'famous' for Biryani were important Mughal cities.

Another explanation I've come across is that as "Beryan" means to fry, Biryani got its name because it's basically fried meat + rice. Of course it evolved into more of a curried meat + rice sort of thing, but the spices are definitely Persion-derived.

> Korma/Naan are turkish or central asian in origin.

Possibly, cooking flatbread in an oven is as old as time. Probably dates back to someone 8000 years ago laying down flattened dough on a pile of hot coals or rocks.

Also keep in mind Persia has been Persia for longer than there's been Turks in Turkey, and most central asian cultures have definite Persian influence.

The current form definitely came into India from Persia.

> Jalebi is semitic possibly arabic in origin.

Possibly, definitely came to India from Persia though.

<comment><USER2> This is what Persian Biryani looks like, pretty sure it is nothing like Indian Biryanis. I was pretty surprised when I saw it on a cooking travel show.

[http://www.kosherdelight.com/Iran_Recipes_Beryani.gif](http://www.kosherdelight.com/Iran_Recipes_Beryani.gif)

[http://www.iliveinafryingpan.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/...](http://www.iliveinafryingpan.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/cover.jpg)

How are the spices 'definitely' Persian derived. I remember the spices used for Indian biryanis and they run the entire gamut definitely not common in Persia even today.

Well Turkic people have been around long before Turkey. Mughalai cuisine is strongly influenced by central asian cuisine not Persian. Regarding Turks and Central Asia, they have a culture and history independent of Persia or Middle east or China. Most of the Muslims came to India directly via central asia and had their own culture. They did not detour via Persia. Korma for example cooking meats in yogurt/cream after braising most definitely a central asian cultural byproduct.

<comment><USER8> Central Asia was Iranian before it was Turkic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Persian is a beautiful language. Especially when spoken by females, it sounds so soft and precious (ok, in my mind there are "man"-languages and "female"-languages, depending on which sex sounds nicer when using them)</comment>


Coronavirus sends MD-88 'Mad Dog' jets to an early retirement from US fleets - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/delta-retires-md-88-and-md-90-jets-early-because-of-the-coronavirus.html <comment><AUTHOR> _The retirement also ends the era of the McDonnell Douglas name, the company that Boeing acquired in 1997. The planes' were based on a jet whose history stretches back to the 1960s, the DC-9._</comment>


40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/06/12/tooltips-scripts-ajax-javascript-css-dhtml/ <comment><USER2> perhaps don't just use them on static items users are going to encounter everytime --- they'll become annoyances after the very short time users got to master their purpose.</comment>


Breaking the physical limits of fonts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/graphitemaster/breaking_the_physical_limits_of_fonts#breaking-the-physical-limits-of-fonts <comment><USER2> A weird thing about some early discrete arcade games is that they generated 3x5 pixel digits without a ROM. They used a 7448 seven-segment decoder -- you know, like those cool LCD/LED clock radios. A BCD counter drives the 7448, then it feeds into a couple of multiplexers and a handful of gates, which generates the video signal.

I gotta think there's a better way, but I'm not inclined to second-guess these designers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related submission on Millitext from 5 months ago, over 240 points, over 50 comments :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702900)

</comment><comment><USER4> It certainly tested the physical limits of my aging eyes. The version on the poorly-calibrated display was a good bit easier to read than that on the well- calibrated display.

</comment><comment><USER5> lovely article. but also i find it so refreshing to read this as a simple github readme vs. a tweetstorm or popup-filled, gated medium article.

</comment><comment><USER6> DPI scaling can ruin this effect too. Sub-pixel rendering is really a game for mature font renderers unfortunately.

<comment><USER7> I'm glad you pointed this out, I was ready to write this off as an illusion that just doesn't work for me. Provided your render scale is 100%, it's a very cool trick. Naturally easier to see on a lower DPI screen too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article. As an aside: I found the bit buffer function a little hard to read. I suspect that's because I haven't done a lot of work where I've needed to manipulate bits in a procedural way. Can anyone recommend any resources / exercises for me to get better at this?

</comment><comment><USER9> One could actually learn to read these five pixel characters. Amazing

<comment><USER10> Not so amazing for those who, tired of the 40-column limit of their Commodore-64 or similar machine, took to such tricks to get up to 80 columns of text on screen (e.g. SpeedScript did this [1] as did TASword [2]). Was it easy to read? No, it wasn't. It was hardly readable to be honest but it did make it possible to get a full line of text on the screen.

[1] [https://archive.org/stream/1987-12-computegazette/Compute_Ga...](https://archive.org/stream/1987-12-computegazette/Compute_Gazette_Issue_54_1987_Dec#page/n75/mode/2up)

[2] [https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-g2rIQtaJyKE/V2VO_lF88vI/AAAAAAAAB...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-g2rIQtaJyKE/V2VO_lF88vI/AAAAAAAAB8w/RNmP7ZB2ZqIADT33uKGx-5SFlxOgr9BAACLcB/s1600/TASword.png)

<comment><USER11> Meanwhile, those of us still slumming it on our TI-99/4As were stuck with a word processor that didn't even try. Not only was TI-Write stuck in 40- (or perhaps 32-) column mode, but they didn't even bother changing the TI's default font, which mapped lowercase code points to small-cap glyphs, making text look nasty, hard to read, and nothing like printed output.

The dedication and achievements of the Commodore community never cease to amaze me.

<comment><USER12> Weren't you able to change fonts?

<comment><USER13> Yes, but on a machine that primitive, loading a font takes a significant percentage of the entire computer's resources.

Each character required 8 bytes to define its bitmap. If all you want to do is define only the 52 uppercase and lowercase letters (which was allowed), that's still over 400 bytes. The entire computer only had 16,384 bytes of RAM, and not all of that was available to the user.

Also, there is the small matter of how you're going to load it. The obvious answer is to write a BASIC program to issue the font commands, and store the BASIC program to cassette tape.

Then every time you turn on the computer, you have to make sure the cassette is loaded into the tape drive, make sure it is rewound to the correct spot, type the command to begin reading a program, press play on the cassette deck, wait what might literally be a minute for it to read, stop the cassette, run the program, then delete the program from memory. This whole process is likely to take five minutes.

So you end up asking yourself, can I stand to just look at these ugly characters? And the answer is basically yes.

EDIT: I should add, the word processor was probably on a ROM cartridge. presumably they could have included a font on that cartridge and loaded it without all this tedium if they wanted a font to be available just for that application. So maybe not as bad as I am portraying it.

<comment><USER11> On the TI-99/4A, if you redefined characters using BASIC, you can only expect such redefinitions to last as long as your BASIC session. Booting into another program (especially on cartridge, as I believe TI Writer was) required a system reset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> this would be a nice easter-eggy way to watermark photographs.

<comment><USER13> Maybe photographs not compressed with JPEG. I'm pretty sure JPEG wouldn't preserve this detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> very nice article, love the background info on what's being done. been looking at implementing a simple font renderer for some bare metal software and something like this would be awesome to try and save some resources!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER17> I once made something similar-ish (sans the fancy subpixel stuff) for rendering numbers into favicons for my cryptocurrency tracker.

Tiny number renderer: [https://github.com/akx/bdf.js/tree/master/tinyb](https://github.com/akx/bdf.js/tree/master/tinyb) Cryptocurrency tracker: [https://akx.github.io/goligoi](https://akx.github.io/goligoi)</comment>